Kill Chain

by Meg Gardiner

  She didn’t move, but her eyes slid his way.

  He tilted his head and smiled. “Didn’t your mom tell you? Didn’t Evan tell you who I was?”

  “You’re not my brother. I don’t have a brother.”

  “Well, technically your half brother. I’m sorry your mother never told you about me. But she likes to keep secrets, doesn’t she?”

  She held as still as glass, but her eyes ran over him. Admiring him—she would have to be. Now, at the very last minute, everything was coming together. They were in a hurry—Rio wanted him to come immediately—but not even her rough urgency could upset him this afternoon. He had Georgia. He smoothed his hand along the nape of her neck.

  “I know this is all a shock. But you’re home now. And we’re going to be close. Very close.”

  They were here. He squealed to a stop, grinning.

  The port was buzzing toward the evening. The sun had sunk from gold to orange, hanging fire off the bottom of the rain clouds and glaring from puddles on the ground. Jesse stared through the windshield. In the distance, a gigantic forklift carried a twenty-foot container toward the dock like an offering. Half a mile away across the enormous tarmac, a container ship was tied up. Lights illuminated the gantry cranes that were loading cargo into the hold. Farther on, cruise ships were lit up like party favors. But here it was dead.

  He checked his watch. He had been here ten minutes. No sign of Rio. No sign of the police. He scanned the view one more time, wanting to put his finger on what was wrong.

  Everything.

  He put his hand on the ignition just as the phone rang. He barely had a signal. He grabbed it, seeing an unfamiliar number. The voice on the other end was barely coherent.

  “They got her; Jesse, they have her. Jesus Christ.”

  “P.J.?” He felt the cold going through him like an ice pick. “How?”

  “From the Starbucks. I went to the head and they punched my lights out. A woman claimed she was a cop with information about Georgie’s mom. You have to find her.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I don’t know. You have to get her.”

  “Did you have time to drink your coffee?”

  “What? I don’t . . . Two cups are here on the table. Georgie’s hot chocolate, it’s, like, full.”

  Right after they got there, then. Maybe forty-five minutes ago. Too long.

  P.J. broke into tears. “Jess, bro, oh, God.”

  “I’m on it.”

  He hung up, fired up the truck, and floored it. The back end slid on the wet tarmac. He straightened out and accelerated back toward the entrance to Pacific Gateway Freight. He called Lily. Busy. Tried Drew Farelli: same. He hit 911. The dispatcher answered smoothly.

  “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “I need the L.A. port police. There’s an assault in progress at the harbor, and a law enforcement officer may be down.”

  There was a pause. “Sir, is this in relation to an earlier call?”

  “Andrew Farelli of the U.S. Attorney’s Office called the port police. Detective Lilia Rodriguez of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department may also have called in.”

  “One moment, sir.”

  The truck bore across the tarmac. A new voice came on the line.

  “Sir, we received the call from someone identifying herself as a Santa Barbara County sheriff’s detective, but then got a call from the shipping company at that location telling us that the call was a hoax.”

  “You canceled the dispatch?” he said.

  “We confirmed with the security guard at the shipping company that the call was a hoax. You’re abusing the nine-one-one system. Get off the line or you’ll be prosecuted.”

  “It was no hoax. Assault, kidnapping, a little girl’s missing. Get everybody within five miles of the Pacific Gateway Freight terminal over here, now.”

  He gunned the pickup toward the guard hut and chain-link rolling gate. The guard had told the dispatcher not to send the cops. That meant Rio had paid him off. Jesse knew what was going to happen next: 911 would call the guard again and he would tell them, again, that it was all a hoax. At this stage the cops would probably send an officer to investigate, but maybe not fast enough. And in the meantime, the guard would shut the gate so he couldn’t get in.

  He heard the broken desperation in his brother’s voice. Georgie. Flat out, he drove toward the gate.

  Inside the container, Rio continued laughing. “Evan Delaney. Did you really think you could beat me?”

  Dad wore a heart-rending look. An airless dread took hold of me.

  I dropped Farelli and stood up. He swiped his hands at my ankle.

  “You can’t leave me lying here,” he said. “Get me an ambulance.”

  I opened the doors of the container. Rio had worked herself into an awkward sitting position against the wall, like a fur-clad slug. Behind her I saw dirty blankets bunched in the corner, and scratch marks on the walls. A girl’s shoe. Notches. Graffiti. Days, weeks spent in here, desperation, prayers clawed into the paint. Rio was smiling. She looked imperious and carnal.

  I stepped through the doorway. “I know Christian has myelodysplastic syndrome.”

  The smile faded.

  Dad turned to her. “Fatal, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Sixty-five percent mortality within five years of diagnosis.”

  She swallowed. “Don’t you dare speak about this. It is a horrible thing. Watching my son slip away more every month. Stop that look.”

  “But you think you’ve found a cure.” Taking Farelli’s phone from my pocket, I dialed Christian’s number. “You think you’ve found a bone marrow donor.”

  I put the phone to my ear. It rang and Christian’s breathless, annoyed voice came on the line.

  “Farelli, what’s going on down there? It’s cold as hell, and I gotta take care of something. Who’s doing all that crying and whining?”

  Oh, my God. He was here.

  I forced myself not to look around for him. Think. I had to use this to my advantage. Christ, was he armed? Getting himself into a position where he had a clear shot at us? I pushed the doors to the container wide-open and stared at Rio.

  “Nicholas Gray knew you from his days as counsel to the Senate Committee on Intelligence, right?” I said.

  “He understands how things work,” she said.

  “He wanted information about Dad, showing him in a bad light?”

  “How hard was that? It was like a gift from heaven.”

  “How did you know that the Riverbend file contained video of Hank’s murder?”

  “The camera was ripped out of the wall at Hank’s place. Only two people could have taken it.” She looked at Dad. “You or Jakarta Rivera.”

  “And you planned to turn it over to Gray if he told you where to find Dad?”

  From the ground behind me came a groan. Drew said, “Oh, my God.”

  So, he was a sucker. I turned away from him.

  “Two problems, Rio. One, the Riverbend file doesn’t show Dad killing Hank.”

  “And your father has a crypto key in his ring. Stop this lying. You are bad at it.”

  “The camera in Hank’s house wasn’t the only one recording the event. There’s satellite footage.” I turned to Dad. “Why do you think that was?”

  “NSA must have had a satellite in position over Thailand, probably observing a military exercise. Lucky timing.”

  “The satellite feed shows Shiver on a roof across the street, pulling the trigger. You ordered her to go ahead with the hit, even though she called and told you that Christian was there.”

  She opened her mouth, but maybe for once in her life didn’t have anything to latch onto.

  “That footage proves Dad’s innocence, and your guilt. You had Christian’s father killed.”

  Drew knocked his head back against the ground. The guy really was an asshat.

  Rio wriggled and her fur slipped from her shoulders. “You know, I like this a
ttitude. The nerve you show when you cannot possibly escape. I think you would make a decent whore.”

  “You haven’t heard the worst part yet. You sent your freaks to snatch Georgie, because you wanted a blood relative who could give Christian a bone marrow transplant. But Georgie isn’t Christian’s sister.”

  She laughed.

  In my backpack I had Georgie’s birth certificate and passport. I took them out and set them on her lap.

  “Hank Sanger wasn’t Georgie’s father.” I backed out of the container. “Phil Delaney is.”

  Silence cracked the space around us. Rio stared at the documents. Dad let out a breath. I didn’t look at him and he didn’t speak to me.

  Rio shook her head. “This is . . .”

  “Georgie was born eleven years ago. I haven’t verified the time stamp on the NSA satellite imagery, but Hank died twelve years ago. Correct?”

  Still she looked at the papers, no longer in disbelief but distress. I retrieved them and returned them to my backpack.

  “Georgie was conceived months after Hank was murdered. He couldn’t have been her father.”

  “You cannot . . .”

  She gulped a breath and cried out, doubling over so hard that for a second I thought something had burst inside her gut.

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  “Christian has no sister. He has no other blood relatives besides you. And I’m guessing you’re not a tissue match.”

  “This . . . It can’t be. You are lying.”

  “No. I’m a bad liar. You said so yourself.”

  She pressed her forehead to the floor of the container, breathing hard.

  “It’s because of the drugs you gave him when he was a teenager, isn’t it? What, chemotherapy to shut off his endocrine system at a critical stage of puberty, so he could pass as a girl? Radiation therapy, something that disrupted his cell structure?”

  Dad picked up the broom handle and levered himself to his feet. “She got her clients to ask for the beautiful black-haired girl, then caught them on camera messing with an underage boy. Even in the world’s worst diplomatic back alleys, that’s a career killer. It means you put a bullet through the roof of your mouth.” He limped up next to me. “Christian was her unbeatable blackmail tool.”

  “You caused this illness, Rio. And now he’s going to die, because there’s nobody to save him.”

  She looked at us and lifted her chin, defiant. “Fuck you.”

  She burst into tears. For a second I watched her sob, head thrown back, teeth bared. I put Farelli’s phone to my ear.

  “Christian, did you get that?” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. That was a yes, then.

  “Here’s the deal. I’ll trade Georgie for your mother,” I said.

  Dad and Rio both glared at me.

  “You want your mother, don’t you? Badly. Do it now, before the police come.”

  His voice was raspy. “I hate you.”

  I hung up. He would understand my offer. It wasn’t about altruism. It was about blood.

  37

  Jesse drove toward the security hut. The guard stepped outside and watched him approach. The 911 dispatcher was still scolding him.

  “This is no joking matter, sir. If you do not get off the line—”

  “Send someone to the harbor.” He steered straight ahead. “There’s a smashup at the guard hut at Pacific Gateway.”

  The dispatcher’s nagging turned to alarm. “When did this happen?”

  “Right now.”

  He dropped the phone. The guard glanced at the gate and ran back inside the hut. That could only mean he was going to push the button to shut it.

  Jesse leaned on the horn. It was just a wooden hut with a chair and a couple of TVs inside. The guard looked up. Sixty yards, fifty, and he hit the brakes hard, spun the wheel, and pulled the emergency brake. The tail of the truck whipped around, and he slid sideways toward the hut, rubber smoking off the tires.

  Run, man.

  The guard gaped at him for a second. Then he hauled butt out of the way.

  The tail of the truck swung 180 degrees. With a hard whump the tailgate smashed into the hut. His head snapped back against the headrest.

  The guard waved his arms. “Asshole! Fuck you doing?”

  Getting the cops to come. Jesse caught his breath, cleared his head, and put the truck in drive. The guard waddled toward the gate, planning to close it by hand. Jesse floored it through.

  The sun was an orange glare on the horizon. He ripped across the tarmac to the spot where he had let Farelli out, at the entrance to the corridor between the stacks. He skidded into it. Ahead he saw Lily’s car.

  He screeched to a stop beside it. The driver’s door was open.

  “Lily. Shit, Lily.”

  She was unconscious inside the car, slumped on her side across the front seat. He turned the truck around, backed up, and approached her, driver’s door to driver’s door. He hucked himself out, holding onto the frame of the truck, and grabbed her door so he could stand up and not lose his balance.

  “Lily.”

  She didn’t respond. Her right hand was cuffed to the steering wheel. He reached down, trying to get hold of her left hand and check for a pulse, and felt himself going over. Dammit.

  He hung onto the car door, but it swung with him and he found himself on his butt on the wet ground. He gritted his teeth. He didn’t have time for this.

  “Lily.”

  He hauled himself to the door, grabbed her arm, and pulled. It was bad procedure, but he had no time to observe rescue protocol. She came upright, a rag doll, and kept coming, toppling toward him out the door. He caught her and put his fingers against her neck.

  Pulse, good and strong. And she was breathing. Her eyelids fluttered.

  “Lily, it’s Jesse. Can you hear me?” She didn’t respond. He snapped his index finger against her cheek, hard. “Wake up, Rodriguez.”

  He snapped her again. She winced and opened her eyes—lazily, without focus—and then she saw him. Looked up at his face, realized she was in his arms and the car all at once.

  “What am I doing like this?”

  “What happened to you?”

  It took a moment. “Drew.”

  “Farelli?”

  “Choked me.”

  He felt colder than the wind. “What?”

  “Got his hands around my neck and ... I blacked out. He must have—Oh, God, my head kills. He punched me in the head.”

  She sounded scared. Deeply scared, and embarrassed, and out of control. Her hands moved. He felt her try to sit up and saw her move her legs. Good.

  “How am I doing?” she said.

  “Better than I am.”

  Her voice chipped around the edges. “My gun.” She felt under her jacket and relaxed. It was in her holster.

  “Can you sit up?”

  She tried and failed. “No.” She was fighting back tears.

  “Don’t worry.”

  He saw the bruises on her neck, and a rage fell over him. Drew had sent him on a wild-goose chase and beaten Lily up. He lifted her up straight and leaned her back in the seat. She slumped against the headrest, drifting out of focus again.

  Her eyes closed. “Can’t. Sorry.”

  “I have it covered.”

  When he slipped her gun out of the holster, she didn’t notice. He hitched himself back up into the truck, swung it around, and hauled down the corridor. He squeezed around another corner in the metal maze and saw Rio’s black Mercedes. Behind it was parked a low-slung red Viper. Pulling up next to it, he saw a narrow path heading off to the side, back into the stacks. And then a dead end, nothing but containers. Hell.

  Maybe there was another way in. He gunned the truck down the lane and out of the stack onto an empty patch of tarmac. At the water’s edge, lights blazed from the gantry cranes. Two forklifts were lugging their way toward the dock, bullish monster trucks with wheels the height of a man. A third was idling about fifty yards aw
ay.

  He drove toward it. The driver was drinking a cup of coffee in the cab while he watched the stacking crane wheel its load this way across the top of the container stack. The tines on the front of the forklift were massive, prongs like I beams extending nine or ten feet. He honked. The driver looked up, startled, and put down the window in his cab.

  He looked florid and suspicious. “Who are you?”

  “I need help. Some people are trapped in the center of the stack. The cops are on the way, but there’s no time. One officer’s down, back the other way.”

  “You yanking my chain?”

  “No way.”

  “Why you driving around out here?”

  Jesse jerked his thumb toward the cargo bed, where the wheelchair was lashed down. “I’m no good at climbing over containers. I need some lifting capacity.”

  The guy stared at him, trying to figure out if this was for real, and probably how much grief he would get for messing with the loading sequence, and whether the union would back him up.

  “Come on,” the driver said.

  The wind whorled down the metal gully where I stood, dense with salt air and diesel exhaust. Dad stood beside me, leaning on the broomstick. We looked up.

  On the top of a container stacked two high, Christian appeared. His pale face was tinted red with the sun, hair swirling in the wind, black coat flying.

  “Lord Almighty.” Dad took a step. “Georgia—”

  Christian had her, clasped tight to his side. One hand was clawed into her hair, holding her by her ponytail. The other held a gun to her throat. She looked terrified—frozen, as if her mind were shutting down in the face of overload. My heart broke. Don’t fold, girl. Hang on.

  I called up. “You’re running out of time, Christian. The police will be here in a minute. Let Georgie go.”

  Inside the container, Rio squirmed herself closer to the door. She let out a noise of disgust. “You brought her? What the hell were you thinking?”

  He looked down at her. “Is what they’re saying true?”

  “No, they’re full of lies.”

  “Stop it, Mom. Am I hosed?”

  She sighed and shut her eyes. “Trade the girl, Christian. Let’s get out of here.”