Driving Force (Declan’s Defenders Book 4)

by Elle James

  Jane shivered, not liking the feeling of the place. The dust reminded her of the dirt floor in her Syrian cell. The sooner she got out of there the better.

  “I don’t see anything up here,” Gus said. “Let’s go to the ground floor. Maybe there’s a secret cupboard off the subterranean conference room below Mr. Halverson’s office.”

  Glad to be out of the attic, Jane hurried downstairs.

  Declan met them halfway down on the second floor. “Anything?”

  Gus shook his head. “We even tapped on the walls and listened for anything that sounded hollow.”

  “Same here,” Declan said. “We checked every room except Charlie’s. Grace is helping her go through it now.”

  “We thought we might look in the subterranean conference room.” Gus followed Jane down the steps, Declan close behind. “Perhaps there’s a hidden door we haven’t noticed.”

  Declan nodded. “It would make sense, since the conference room is more or less hidden beneath Halverson’s old office.” When they reached the ground floor, Declan fell in beside Gus. “I’m surprised Halverson didn’t involve his wife more in what he was doing.”

  “He might not have wanted her to be so close to the truth of what he was doing that she’d become a target.”

  Jane snorted. “She lived with the man. Isn’t that close enough? Don’t you think the attacks could be continuations of the effort to end whatever John Halverson was doing? They might think Charlie is just as involved.”

  “True. All the more reason for full disclosure,” Declan said. “We need to know just what John Halverson was dealing with.”

  “We could go through his office again,” Jane said. “We might be missing something.” She so desperately wanted to find anything that would help her to understand why she had been led to Halverson’s estate. What did he have to do with the Trinity symbols? Was he involved with an organization that used the Trinity knot as a sign? Or was he investigating such an organization in an attempt to bring it down?

  What was the Trinity organization and what was it involved with? Did they hire out like mercenaries to assassinate for a paycheck? Was that why she’d been in Syria?

  God, she hoped not. She prayed she wasn’t an assassin for hire. That the intel had been wrong. She wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. She didn’t feel like it was in her nature to kill unnecessarily.

  “I’m going out to the garage via the access tunnel to help Snow search there.” Declan nodded toward Halverson’s study. “Good luck. We didn’t find anything when we went through the files and drawers. But then a second pair of eyes is always a good thing.”

  Alone in the office with Gus, Jane couldn’t help glancing his way. Before they’d discovered she could be a trained assassin, he’d kissed her and left her with a vague promise of more that night. Would he carry through with that promise, now that he knew she might be a ruthless assassin?

  Jane didn’t hold out any hope of that happening. A man would have to be crazy to consort with someone like her.

  She ran her fingers along the top of John Halverson’s desk, searching for any recessed buttons or switches that would open the desk like the one at corporate headquarters. The desktop was all smooth mahogany, not a bump or crevice anywhere on its shiny surface.

  Squatting in front of the desk, she tried to think like a man who had things to hide. She felt along the underside of the surface for any indentations that would fit a finger. Again, she found nothing. Studying the overall construction of the massive desk, she realized the drawers didn’t start until a good six inches below the desktop. The wood above it was an intricate, inlaid panel of highly polished mahogany with carved designs that appeared to be a kind of latticework of vines crisscrossing over each other. She touched the pattern, feeling along the raised carving all the way to the corner. Her fingers pressed into the corner and it moved outward. When it moved, the rest of the inlaid design dropped forward on hinges and a thin shelflike drawer popped out.

  Jane jerked up so fast, she bumped her head on the desktop.

  Gus turned from the fireplace mantel he’d been running his fingers across. “Hey, are you okay over there?”

  “I think I found something,” she said, rubbing the top of her head. She rose up to stand, looking down at the shallow drawer. Inside was a journal, flat enough to fit in the small space. She lifted it out of the drawer and laid it on the desk’s surface.

  Gus joined her as she opened the journal and read the words on the first page.

  “The Trinity Syndicate.”

  A cold chill rippled down the back of Jane’s spine and a heavy feeling settled deep in her belly.

  She turned the page and read what appeared to be a diary written by John Halverson about his investigation into the inner workings of the organization called The Trinity Syndicate.

  He’d first learned of the group when a potential presidential candidate was killed in a freak hunting accident during the primaries. Though the police couldn’t prove it was anything more than an accident, rumors spread that the candidate had been murdered, the murderer having staged it so it didn’t appear deliberate.

  John hadn’t thought much of it then, but when a bombing occurred in a government building, everyone assumed it was a product of Taliban terrorism. True, the vehicle used to carry the bomb and left in the underground garage had been driven by a man associated with the Taliban, but the type of bomb was much too complicated and intricate to be something generally associated with the Taliban brand of terrorism.

  A German delegate to the European Union who opposed lifting sanctions against Russia was believed to have committed suicide by jumping from a bridge onto a deserted stretch of the Autobahn in the middle of the night. Though an autopsy was conducted, there wasn’t much left to look at after his body had been run over by several large delivery trucks before anyone realized it was a human body in the middle of the road.

  One page after another detailed incidents deemed accidents or terrorist activities that John believed were in fact orchestrated by The Trinity Syndicate to cause different outcomes in political arenas.

  Near the middle of the journal, John had sketched a diagram that caught and held Jane’s attention and made her heart thud against her ribs.

  In effect, the diagram was an organization chart with code names at each level. At the bottom of one of the tree branches was the name Indigo.

  Chapter Eleven

  Gus stared down at the name on the page. He could feel Jane stiffen and hear the sharp intake of breath.

  “We don’t know that you are that person,” he reminded her.

  “What if I am?”

  “We deal with it. Until then, you can’t worry about it.”

  “Oh, but I can,” she whispered.

  “Declan! Mack! Gus! Snow! Anyone!” Cole’s voice came through the open door in the wall of the study that led down into the basement conference room. “You gotta see this!”

  Declan appeared in the doorway to the study, Mack close behind him. “Is that Cole?”

  Gus nodded, grabbed the journal and hurried down the stairs into the room below the study.

  Cole sat at a desk with an array of six monitors arranged in two rows of three each attached to the wall.

  Jonah Spradlin sat beside him, staring at the different screens, shaking his head. “Wow. Look at it all.”

  Gus, Jane and the others all crowded around behind Cole.

  “What are we looking at?” Declan asked.

  “I’m on the Dark Web. I got a tip to look in a certain location and found all of this.” He waved a hand toward the monitors.

  One screen played a video of children in their preteens and teens wearing tattered dirty-white martial arts shirts and pants. Their heads were shaved whether they were boys or girls and they were being yelled at by a man with an equally shaved head. He instructed them on the pro
per way to take a man down and snap his neck. The children were then paired off to practice the moves up to the snapping of the neck. When one failed to perform it properly, he or she was beaten with a horse-riding crop.

  Jane tensed. With every blow, she winced, feeling the child’s pain as if it were her own.

  “And look at this.” Jonah pointed at a screen of newspaper articles about children whose parents had passed away and how they were being placed in foster care. Then the foster parents were charged with child neglect when the children ran away or disappeared.

  Pictures of the missing children were displayed on milk cartons and in newspapers. Beside the child’s milk-carton photo was another of a similar child in appearance with the shaved head and white outfit of the Trinity recruits.

  “They’re stealing children,” Grace said from behind Declan.

  Cole nodded, his lips forming a tight line. “And forcing them into their training programs.”

  “John would never have been involved in something like that,” Charlie said. “He loved children, even though we never had any. He would have done everything in his power to help them.”

  Gus held up the journal. “I think that’s exactly what he was trying to do.”

  Charlie took the book from his hands and opened it to the first page. “Where did you find this?” she said, her voice cracking. “That’s John’s handwriting.”

  “It was in a secret drawer in his desk,” Jane said.

  As Charlie turned the pages, Declan and the others peered over her shoulders. When she got to the organization chart, she gasped and looked up at Jane.

  Jane nodded in acknowledgement. “He knew about Indigo.”

  “We don’t know if that’s you or not,” Charlie said.

  “Based on the diagram, he was trying to determine the names of those in charge at each of the levels of the organization.”

  “Indigo is the bottom of the pyramid, a soldier on the front lines,” Snow said. “She followed orders of the person above her.”

  “And that would be the guy with the code name Mule.” Gus pointed to the next level on the diagram. “His handler is Wolf and the top of the food chain is Asp.”

  Charlie turned the page to the next journal entry. “He found Indigo.” She looked up into Jane’s eyes.

  Jane moved closer to the book and read the words written in bold black ink.

  I learned of the next operation Trinity had planned to initiate their operator Indigo. Buried in the Dark Web I understood this to be her first assignment, the one she needed to prove herself and her loyalty to the syndicate. Her tasking was to kill a Saudi crown prince. This particular prince was known for frequenting brothels where young girls were kept as sex slaves in the back alleys of the Bronx. This Saudi prince was also known for selling Russian secrets to the Chinese.

  Apparently, the Russians were willing to pay a hefty sum to have that information leak fixed.

  I flew to NYC, dressed as a homeless man and lay in the alley near the entrance to the brothel waiting for the crown prince to show. He did, with three of his bodyguards, just as the informant on the Dark Web said he would. He was inside for over an hour when he finally emerged, with all three of his men surrounding him.

  I never saw her slip into the alley, but suddenly Indigo was there. She wore a tight dress and spike heels with enough makeup to make her look like a street whore. When she walked up to the prince, he thought he was going to get a little more action. He made a grab for her breasts.

  She barely blinked before she punched him in the throat, crushing his trachea. The prince clutched at his throat, unable to breathe past the blockage.

  The three bodyguards, caught unawares, tried to capture her, but she was too fast. In some incredible martial arts moves, she had all three men flat out on the ground and unconscious in under a minute. Meanwhile the prince’s face turned blue and he dropped to the ground, lying perfectly still.

  Indigo bent to feel for a pulse. When she was satisfied there was none, she straightened and entered the brothel.

  That’s when I knew she was different. She wasn’t just a trained assassin. She’d probably broken all the rules of her training by not leaving as soon as she’d completed her mission.

  I waited, hoping her handler would appear and I’d have another link in the chain of command. If I wanted to stop the assembly line of child conscription, I had to find the leader.

  Her handler never appeared. A few minutes later, Indigo emerged from the brothel, carrying one young unconscious girl over her shoulder and leading a dozen others. Indigo’s face was bloodied, but the men inside hadn’t stopped her. She got those girls out.

  I followed her to the nearest hospital where she left the unconscious girl and the dozen others at the entrance to the ER. She stopped an older couple on their way in and asked them to send help outside for the girls. When they said they would, she waited a few moments longer with the girls. As nurses and orderlies emerged to help, Indigo disappeared into the shadows.

  I heard later that the men running the brothel had been critically injured and wouldn’t be in the business of selling young girls for sex ever again. I made certain the girls had the care they needed to wean them off the drugs, and legal assistance to lead them through the red tape of immigration.

  Charlie sniffed, a fat tear rolling down her cheek. “John had a good heart.”

  “Indigo murdered that crown prince,” Mack pointed out.

  Charlie glared. “He grabbed her first. She was defending herself. The prince didn’t deserve to live after what he’d done to those poor girls.”

  “I think I recall the reports on television.” Declan’s lip twisted. “They said the Saudi crown prince had been killed in a mugging.”

  Charlie turned the page and kept reading. “I can hear John speaking these words.” Another tear rolled down her cheek. “He only wanted to help.”

  Gus stared at all the images on the monitors and then turned to Jane. Had she been one of the young children who’d gone missing from foster care? Had they beaten her and trained her to be an assassin?

  Jane stood back from the others, her face pale, her eyes wide. She stared at the images in front of her, her eyes darting back and forth from one to the next. Her hands shook and her body trembled. Then she looked into Gus’s eyes, her own dark with whatever was going through her mind.

  “What’s wrong?” Gus crossed to her and tried to take her into his arms.

  She held up her hand and shook her head. “Don’t touch me,” she whispered.

  Her entire body shook and she wrapped her arms around her middle as if in pain. “I remember,” she said. “I am Indigo.”

  * * *

  AS SHE’D STOOD staring at the videos and photos of the girls and boys being indoctrinated into the Trinity Syndicate, something had happened. The iron gate that had been closed for all those weeks due to her beatings and torture opened and a flood of memories washed in. She remembered being taken from the front yard of the foster home where she’d been placed only days after her parents had died in a plane crash. She hadn’t even had time to get used to the family that had taken her in when she’d been thrown in the back of a van and taken far away to a training camp in the woods.

  She couldn’t even tell anyone where the camp was located. She hadn’t been able to see out of the van as it traveled for miles along endless highways and then dirt roads, coming to a stop in a place with ramshackle huts and outhouses instead of toilets. All bathing and laundry was done in the nearby frigid stream. She wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone without getting hit in the side of the head by some heavy-handed instructor.

  The newest recruits slept on dirt floors with only scratchy and threadbare wool blankets to keep them warm. As they graduated from one section of training into another, and they proved themselves worthy, they got army cots or wooden bunks. If they didn’t prove t
hemselves strong, fast or smart enough, they were beaten.

  The physical demands had been hard, but she’d managed to build her strength and stamina. Along with that, she’d learned never to show emotion.

  From the beginning, she’d demonstrated an aptitude for languages. Her trainers sent her straight into Russian and Arabic language training. All of her instruction from then on out had been using these languages only.

  Once she’d surpassed her instructors, they turned her to teaching the others until they deemed her ready to deploy.

  Her first assignment had been as John’s journal had depicted. She’d studied the Saudi crown prince’s dossier. He was a piece of work. Not only did he rape young girls, he systematically eliminated anyone in his cabinet who dared to disagree with him. He’d married ten times. When he tired of a wife, he had her killed.

  Thankfully, her first assignment was to kill a man who deserved to die.

  She’d been given the information on when he would arrive and depart the brothel. She’d wanted to dispatch him before he entered, but he’d arrived earlier than expected. Forced to wait, she practiced her attempt at street girl seduction. Never having flirted in her life, she wasn’t very good at it. It didn’t matter to the prince. Anything with breasts was fair game. He’d grabbed, she’d punched and the bodyguards had gone down smoothly. Her orders had been to leave at that point. With the prince dead, she’d nailed her first kill.

  But she couldn’t leave, knowing there were young girls inside the brothel being held against their will. She’d known she’d catch grief if word got back to her handler that she’d gone in. She hadn’t cared. This was something she had to do. It was easier to ask forgiveness than for permission.

  Her stomach roiled at the memories of the inside of the brothel. The stench of fear and urine filled her nostrils. Images of angry men and screaming girls raced through her mind. She remembered going into that brothel. Remembered taking down the men who’d chained those women to the beds or dosed them heavily with drugs. Rage had burned through her when she’d found the girl who couldn’t have been more than eleven years old, beaten and drugged into a coma.