Family Ties (John Taylor Book 5)

by Travis Starnes

  The longer the van drove, the more Taylor doubted their chances for any of that to happen. Ten minutes passed, and the van kept driving. Taylor didn’t know German procedures, but he assumed they would have taken them to the closest precinct for booking.

  Twenty minutes passed, and Taylor started to think he hadn’t given Graf enough credit. They were reaching the outskirts of the city, well away from any of the station's Graf would conceivably take them too. Even if German procedures were different, there wasn’t any conceivable reason they would have taken the pair to a minor station outside of town.

  Taylor had assumed the tactical team was whatever group was on call when the banker had her secretary call it in. Taylor was pretty sure now that wasn’t what had happened. The secretary hadn’t called the police. She’d called Graf.

  Graf must have had a team of guys he could trust standing by, waiting for Taylor and Whitaker to pop up on the radar again. He would have known they were digging around for evidence of what happened. The fact that they’d shown up at his banker's offices proved him right. Graf was a smart man and would have had to have been prepared. Even if they hadn’t gotten anything from the banker, he couldn’t have afforded to let them start talking. The suggestion Graf was dirty would have been enough to get some of his fellow officers thinking twice, enough so they might notice the next time he was asked to do something.

  This was doubly true with Whitaker, who wasn’t just some random suspect. She reported directly to the director of the FBI or had before she’d taken a leave of absence. Her accusation would at least be listened to if it got to one of Graf’s bosses.

  When the van pulled to a stop, and the back doors were pulled open, Taylor’s concerns were confirmed. They weren’t at a police station. From all appearances, this was an abandoned, or at least closed construction site.

  They were pushed out of the van and then down to their knees a few steps from the van. Taylor tried to turn his head to see what was around them, only to be almost knocked down when one of the men smacked him in the side of the head.

  Taylor had stopped thinking of the armed men as cops. It was possible they were all dirty too and working for Graf, but that seemed like a stretch. There would be too much risk in paying off that many actual police officers. More likely, this was some of Graf’s hired muscle dressed like a tactical team.

  Graf walked into view as Taylor pulled himself back upright.

  “You two have been very busy,” he said, stopping a few steps in front of them. “We know that Fredrick had a notebook he was always writing in. A notebook that was missing from his apartment and wasn’t with the other documents you hid. Where is it?”

  They both stared back at him, neither responding.

  “I know that the old woman had it, we’ve confirmed that. The only person she would have given it to is you,” he said, stepping up in front of Whitaker. “Tell me where it is.”

  Whittaker just stared up at him, hatred covering her face.

  Graf stepped back and gave a nod to one of the guards, who hoisted Whitaker up. A second guard stepped forward and smashed the butt of his rifle into Whitaker's stomach, causing her to double over in pain.

  Taylor started to force himself up, only to freeze when the muzzle of the guard's gun behind him pressed into the back of his head. Taylor knew there was nothing he could do, considering he was unarmed and handcuffed, and there were about ten guys with guns standing around, but he hadn’t been able to stop the involuntary response to seeing Whitaker hurt.

  “This can only get worse for you if you don’t tell me what I need to know.”

  “Go to hell,” Whitaker said.

  Another nod from Graf sent on of the soldier's fists smashing into the side of Whitaker’s face. She collapsed to the ground, lying on her side in the dirt. The guard behind her pulled her back up into the kneeling position.

  “We can keep this up for some time.”

  “Good, I like it rough,” she said, spitting blood out into the dirt and sand.

  Graf sighed and pulled the weapon out of the holster on his hip. Lifting the gun to point at Taylor’s head but not turning to look at his target, Graf said, “I will ask you this one last time, and then I will shoot your friend. You came to save him last time, so I think you might make the smart decision and do it again, yes?”

  Whitaker looked side-eyed at Taylor and then deflated, her head hanging. “It’s at a place called Larger Ort Schivelbeiner near the Arnimplatz.”

  “See, that wasn’t hard,” Graf said before looking up at his watch and then at one of the guards. “Give me fifteen minutes to get there and confirm it’s there. If you don’t hear from me by then, kill them. Make it look like they were trying to escape. It will be easier to explain that way.”

  Taylor couldn’t help but noticed Graf had said that last part in English. He wanted them to know what was in store for them. Wanted them to worry. It was a petty man's way of taunting his victims.

  Without saying anything else to the pair of them, Graf turned and walked back to the waiting car. All but two of the armed men went with them. With Taylor and Whitaker unarmed and in handcuffs, they must not have seen the pair as any kind of threat.

  They knelt there quietly for several minutes, waiting. Eventually, boredom got the better of the guards, who began talking to each other in German, taking their attention away from Whitaker and Taylor.

  “Sorry,” Whitaker whispered. “I froze and couldn’t come up with somewhere fake to send him. I had to say something, so I told him the real location.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not. Even with everything we’ve gotten, the journal was still the most likely bit of proof that ties everything together. Without it, we can’t show why Graf was asked to kill Frieda. We’re already weak on evidence. If we want to get out of this, we need that journal.”

  “Well then, I guess we’re going to have to go get it.”

  “How? I’m all out of ideas, here.”

  “We could...” Taylor started to say before he was stopped by a rifle butt smacking him in the back of his head.

  “Quiet,” the guard behind Taylor said, stepping closer to Taylor.

  Taylor managed to not fall forward on his face, but just barely. He was lucky the guy hadn’t gone all out with the reminder to be quiet. Rifles make fairly effective clubs, and the guard could have knocked Taylor out if he'd wanted to. It was probably only Graf’s instructions that kept them from being more brutal. If they wanted to make this look like a legal arrest that went sideways when Taylor and Whitaker tried to escape, they couldn’t afford for the pair to be beaten to a pulp first. Not if they wanted to make the escape attempt look believable.

  That all worked out in Taylor’s favor. Although his head now hurt like hell, this was the moment he’d been waiting for. He fell forward, pulling a leg up to keep from falling over. Instead of kneeling on two knees, he was now up on one bent leg and one knee.

  The trick his friend had taught him about positioning his wrist to make room in the handcuff hadn’t been about comfort when being arrested. It had been step one in how to escape from handcuffs, which is why several of the guys in his unit had tried to learn it. Working in remote places with not always trustworthy locals, there was still a chance someone would try to detain them, and this would be a trick that could save their lives. It turns out that was now coming true, in a manner of speaking.

  The first step, adjusting the wrists to make room in the handcuffs, was the easiest step and have the person cuffing you properly secure the cuffs to keep you from making them looser than they should be.

  The next one always sucked, which is why Taylor had only tried it once or twice. Step two required him to dislocate or break his thumb since he wasn’t double-jointed. Breaking the thumb was the easiest way, since dislocating the joint wrong would break the bones there regardless. It would also put that hand out of commission for a while. Dislocating was harder, but a doctor would be able to put it back in pl
ace fairly easily. The downside of trying to dislocate your own thumb was the possibility of dislocating the first CMC joint at the base of the thumb instead. If he did that, he’d need either a cast for six weeks or surgery to correct the damage. With everything still left to deal with, Taylor couldn’t afford any of those other outcomes.

  Still, the chance for this moment was why he’d set up his left hand as the one he was going to try and slip the cuffs with. If things went wrong, he’d still have his shooting hand, which he was going to need. Taylor folded his thumb inside his palm and then closed his fingers around it. Squeezing hard with his fingers using pressure pushing away from the base of the thumb, Taylor pulled his thumb until he felt a pop, followed by what felt like a bolt of lightning as pain seared its way up his arm.

  He clenched his teeth, holding back the scream that wanted to come out. The whole motion had taken seconds, and the guard was already starting to turn his attention back to his buddy. Taylor couldn’t afford to draw attention to himself. Even with the now dislocated thumb, he would still need a minute to pull his hand out of the cuff, which would entail some thrashing. If the guard was paying attention, it wouldn’t be that hard to stop Taylor if he’d wanted to.

  Thankfully, Whitaker had been paying attention. She didn’t know about his thumb trick for getting out of handcuffs, since he’d never expected to need to use that particular skill and it had never come up. She did know Taylor well enough to know when he was up to something.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said, trying to half stand, only to get pushed back down again by the guard next to her. “I’ll rip your goddam balls off.”

  She then let loose with one of the vilest strings of expletives that Taylor had ever heard. A small part of his brain not needed for getting out of the cuffs was mildly impressed. He was hard-pressed to think of any moment, even in the service, where someone used such colorful language so expertly.

  It did the trick, though. Both men had stopped moving, standing still as they watched Whitaker near foaming out the mouth, spitting curses out of them. It was an Oscar-worthy performance. Neither seemed to even notice Taylor was there anymore.

  Taylor pulled down on the handcuffs, pushing the metal frame over his now more narrow hand. Even with his thumb now folded in with the knuckle no longer sticking out as a barrier and the larger room he’d managed to make, the clearance was very tight. The metal arm of the cuff scrapped against the dislocated joint, causing blinding pain. Taylor kept pushing, trying to ignore the pain.

  After a few seconds, the cuff popped over the thickest part of Taylor’s hand, and he was able to slide his left hand out. He didn’t waste any time. Because he’d readjusted positions, Taylor was able to push up with his bend leg, twisting around. By the time, the guard closest to him registered the movement, Taylor was up, close behind him.

  Taylor threw his left arm around the man's neck, pulling tight. This had the double benefit of pulling the man backward, off-balance, his arms flailing slightly, while also starting to cut off his available air in a half chokehold. Since he was only using one arm, the guard was going to be able to pull out of it reasonably quickly, but that was fine with Taylor. He just needed to have the man reacting instead of trying to directly kill Taylor for a few seconds.

  With his right hand, Taylor reached down and pulled the pistol out of the holster against the man's hip. Lifting the weapon up with his arm extended, Taylor fired. The guard behind Whitaker had just started to realize something was wrong, seeing motion out of his peripheral vision, he hadn’t even begun lifting his rifle up when the bullet smashed into his face.

  Taylor had aimed high, since the guy was wearing tactical gear, including a full vest. Like most in the military, Taylor had been taught to aim center mass as much as possible. The idea that the smaller the target, the more likely he’d miss had been drilled into his head time and time again.

  Thankfully, the combination of a long history in high-intensity situations and hundreds of hours at the range building muscle memory served him well. The guard dropped like a marionette with his strings cut.

  The guy he was holding reached up with both hands, grabbing Taylor’s wrist and trapping the pistol. Taylor’s grip around his neck was too loose to keep him from twisting out of it. The guy had a strong grip on Taylor’s wrist, but there was no way he was freeing the pistol.

  The guy was just releasing one hand off of Taylor, mostly likely to get to the rifle, with the plan to pull it up and get a shot off. Unfortunately for him, he was focused on Taylor and had forgotten that there were two of them.

  The guard had just gotten his hands on his rifle when Whitaker’s heel smashed into the back of his knees, collapsing the man in a heap. Whitaker spent a lot of time training for unarmed confrontations. While she preferred Judo, which helped her in using the weight of larger opponents against them, it was hard to not take that to the next step of combining other disciplines and veering into MMA territory.

  She was all over him the second he hit the ground like some kind of wild terrier. Within seconds, she had the man on his side with her arms around his head and neck and legs wrapped around his waist in a classic triangle, pulling back hard to cut off his air supply. Both the man's hands shot up to tug at Whitaker’s arms, but he had no leverage. Taylor was pretty sure there was a counter to something like this, but he didn’t have the training Whitaker had. Regardless the guy on the ground either didn’t know it or wasn’t able to do it for whatever reason because his pulling at her arms became steadily weaker until finally went limp.

  She pushed him off and popped up.

  “How the hell did you get out of the handcuffs,” she said, looking, securing the unconscious man with his own handcuffs, and zip-tying his feet for good measure.

  Taylor held up his left hand, displaying his throbbing thumb, bent in an obscene z pattern.

  “Something I learned in the service. The downside is I can’t use my left hand until I get to a doctor. The upside is I shoot with my right.”

  “Jesus, John. Doesn’t that hurt?”

  “It hurts like hell, but a lot less than the bullet those two planned on putting in our brains.”

  “We need to get moving.”

  “There’s no way we'll beat Graf to the storage locker. He’ll destroy that book the second he gets his hands on it.”

  “Hiding it there wasn’t my only precaution. The boxes of files were too big to do much with, at least with the time I had available, but I was able to set up some additional security for the journal. He’ll need some time to get into it.”

  “Let’s throw this guy in the back of the van and get going then. Odds are he’s got a sheet. Once we tell the Germans our story, they might be able to get him to roll on Graf.”

  “Sure, but let's hurry. The precautions I took will slow him down, but he’ll eventually be able to get it.”

  Getting the guy into the van was harder than it should have been since Taylor could only lift him with one arm. He’d probably end up with as many bruises from all the times they whacked him accidentally into the vans metal frame as he got from the brief fight with Whitaker.

  They left the dead guard behind but retrieved his weapons. Whitaker would be able to use the small assault rifle. However, Taylor would have to stick to the pistol he’d recovered from his guard since there was no way he could properly hold a rifle with his mangled hand.

  Within a few minutes of their escape, they were pulling out of the construction lot, headed towards Graf and the journal.

  Chapter 14

  Taylor was focused as they drove. Since the last thing he wanted was to get pulled over and have a patrol officer look at the tied up guy in the back of the van, Taylor obeyed every traffic law, while still weaving through traffic to make up every second he could.

  “So, what’s this additional security you set up?” Taylor asked, not taking his eyes off the road.

  “A small fireproof safe that I bolted to the floor of the storage room. It’ll lo
se me my deposit, but they’ll either have to cut out a section of cement or cut into the safe to get the bolts out. Since they can’t take it with them, at least easily, they’ll need to cut into the safe there. While that’s not such a big deal, it seems unlikely Graf just has the stuff needed for that in his car. He’ll have to send someone out for it, and that’ll take some time.”

  “We’re not that far behind him. Maybe five minutes, which means he’s just getting there now. He’ll either have to break in or badge the attendant and bluff his way in without a warrant. Either way, it’ll slow him down a little bit. Unless we hit traffic or something, we should show up not long after he gets into the locker.”

  “Jesus, why didn’t you say ‘this is my last job before I retire’ while you’re at it. You can’t just say ‘unless we hit bad traffic.’”