by Brad Thor
“I don’t know who you’re looking for,” Ryan stated, “but you’ve got the wrong apartment.”
The girl stood dazed for a moment, as if unsure what to say, but then collected herself and asked, “Do you drive a black Nissan Altima?”
“Oh crap. What happened?”
“It wasn’t my fault,” the girl said, quickly adding, “And it wasn’t my boyfriend’s fault. Someone cut us off.”
“Cut you off? What are you talking about? Better yet, who the hell are you and what happened to my car?”
“I’m Chrissie,” she replied with an inebriated smile and a look of misplaced expectation as if the mere mention of her name should be cause for fireworks or a parade. “I live in the building next door.”
She extended her hand, but Ryan ignored it. Clutching the lapels of her robe, she looked out into the hall and then said to Chrissie, “What happened to my car?”
“Like I said. It wasn’t our fault.”
“I got that part, Chrissie. Did you and your boyfriend hit my car? Is it damaged?”
Chrissie tried to raise her thumb and forefinger to indicate that there might be a little damage, but suddenly had trouble raising her arm while keeping her balance. The woman was smashed, and so too, Ryan worried, was her car.
She grabbed her keys from the bowl on the kitchen counter, slipped on a pair of flip-flops kept near the door, and said, “Why don’t you and I go take a look.”
“Sure,” slurred Chrissie as if she had just been invited shopping. “Do you want me to show you where it is?”
“No,” replied Ryan. “I think I can remember where I parked my car.”
As they started toward the stairs, Chrissie said, “Remember, you promised you wouldn’t be mad.”
She had promised no such thing, but there was no reason to argue. The girl was so wasted it probably wouldn’t even get through.
They walked down to the parking lot and over to Ryan’s Nissan. The right rear quarter panel was crushed. Idling perpendicular was a piece-of-shit white panel van with a dinged up push-bumper that must have belonged to Chrissie’s boyfriend. Ryan needed this kind of trouble like she needed a hole in the head.
As she walked over to inspect the damage, the boyfriend got out of the van. “Is that your car?” he asked. He sounded a lot more sober than his girlfriend. Ryan should have taken that as a warning, but her concern over what had happened to her car, coupled with her anger over the repeated problems with so many of the young residents in the complex, caused her to let her guard down.
His headlights perfectly illuminated the damage. This was going to cost at least a thousand dollars to repair, and judging by the looks of these two, they didn’t even have a hundred dollars between them. They probably didn’t have insurance, either. Ryan was growing angrier by the second.
“How did this happen?” she asked, vaguely aware of the young man’s approach on her left side as she bent down to examine the damage. “Do you have any idea how much it’s going to cost to fix this? I want to see your license and insurance card right now.”
The man’s right hand was in his jacket pocket and it didn’t come out until he had reached Ryan’s car and he was close enough to touch her.
It wasn’t until that moment that she processed the unmistakable shape of the Taser in his hand. The cartridge had been removed, which meant he didn’t want to leave a shower of micro-stamped aphids behind as evidence. It also meant he wasn’t afraid to get up close, press the device against her, and deliver its jolt of electricity via a technique known as a “stun drive.”
Either this guy was really good when it came to hand-to-hand, or he had no idea whom he was dealing with. Ryan didn’t wait to find out.
Pivoting on the ball of her left foot, she bladed herself to her attacker and snapped her left arm out in a wide arc. She crashed her forearm into the man’s wrist, knocking the Taser from his hand. She followed with a blow to his sternum, which knocked him backward two steps.
Before he could regain his balance, she charged, throwing a rapid combination of punches and elbows. It was happening so fast that all the man could do was cover up as Ryan rained down the pain.
The jabs, the crosses, all of it had been drilled into her through years of training. All of it came naturally. There was only one thing she neglected to do — sweep the area around her with her eyes.
Had she done that, she might have seen Chrissie coming up from behind. She might have been able to whip her head back and catch Chrissie on the bridge of her nose. Maybe she could have knocked her unconscious. Maybe she could have connected hard enough to render her temporarily dazed. At the very least, she might have been able to buy herself a couple of extra seconds to prevent Chrissie from getting close enough to her, placing another Taser against the side of her neck, and activating the trigger.
CHAPTER 23
Before the effects of the Taser had worn off, Ryan was tossed inside the back of the van, where her hands, feet, and mouth were duct-taped and a black hood was yanked down over her head. As soon as the vehicle started moving, she had her wits about her enough to try to interpret their speed and direction. Every piece of information was vital. Even the smallest data point could mean the difference between life and death.
How could she have been so stupid? She wanted to blame the wine or her jet lag, but she knew that she was ultimately responsible for her predicament right now. She should have never let her guard down.
The only silver lining she could find was that she wasn’t dead, yet. If they had wanted to kill her, they could have put a gun to the base of her skull and pulled the trigger rather than using a Taser on her. But while she saw breathing as a silver lining, she knew that at some point tonight she could end up wishing they had killed her in the parking lot.
She ran through her mind the long list of people around the world she had pissed off badly enough to want to come get her. The fact that the attack had been carried out by two young Caucasians worried the hell out of her, as it could very well be an Islamic operation. As box-of-rocks stupid as so many Muslim foot soldiers were, the men in the organizational structures of the more aggressive terror organizations tended to be rather intelligent. If one of those groups had the wherewithal to track her down like this, they’d never be dumb enough to send a Muslim man, or even a Muslim woman to lure her out of her apartment. The minute she saw either on her doorstep, her antennae would be up. The tipsy blonde with the fender-bender story was the perfect ploy.
Was this about one of the countless harsh interrogations she had conducted? Because if so, there wasn’t a single one that she would go back and change. She believed in the methods the CIA used, including the ones that members of Congress would never know about. They had no idea the type of determined enemy the United States faced. And while she believed in harsh interrogation methods, most of them were tactics that she would never want to be submitted to.
What worried her even more was that boastful lies and one-upmanship were the Muslim terrorist’s stock-in-trade. This went double for stories of capture and interrogation at the hands of the Americans. No matter what had happened in an interrogation, there’d always be one of them quick to jump up and claim they had a worse one. It led to a very perverse view of what Americans actually did in their interrogations.
It was why the thought of being kidnapped by Al-Qaeda or a similar group was something that kept some CIA personnel up at night. They knew that if they ever were grabbed, the interrogation wouldn’t be “harsh,” it would be brutal, and it would definitely be torture.
There was no way Ryan was ever going to submit to that, even if avoiding it meant throwing herself out of a moving vehicle. While she tried to keep track of the movement of the van, she also tried to keep calm as she sought a way to get free. But she was on her stomach, her naked body half exposed beneath her open robe, with her hands and feet bound up hog-tie style. She remembered watching a video once of someone actually getting out of being duct-taped. It involved twist
ing the hands down and out with a quick pop. It also required that your hands be bound in front, something professionals never did.
Rolling onto her right side, she inched in that direction praying that she’d find a screw or an exposed piece of metal, anything that could be used to cut through the tape and get herself free. There was nothing, so she rolled onto her opposite side and slowly felt her way along the filthy floor in that direction. It was just as fruitless. But then she felt something.
It was a small, narrow strip of metal banding, the kind used to secure loads to a wooden pallet. It was about half an inch wide and only an inch long. It wasn’t exactly sharp, but it had been cut on an angle and therefore had a point. Gripping it as best she could, Ryan ignored the pounding in her chest and went to work on her restraints.
About fifteen minutes later, she felt the van make another turn. Based on the speed and lack of stoplights, she figured they had been on Route 123 headed out of Fairfax. Now they were headed in a new direction. Toward what? A safe house? The forest? She worked harder on the duct tape. It had been wrapped around so many times, Ryan couldn’t tell if she was making any progress at all.
A few minutes later, the vehicle began to slow as if the driver was looking for something, an address or a road sign, maybe. No, she said half to herself, half in prayer. Don’t stop yet. I need more time. Please, I need more time. Frantically, she rubbed and stabbed at the tape with the little piece of banding. She could feel the time on her clock running out.
Whatever the driver was looking for, he must have found it, because he made another turn, this time onto a rough, uneven surface. Ryan thought it might be a dirt road of some sort, but after several hundred yards she felt the van make a sharp cut and come to a stop. Was it a turnout or were they in a driveway of some sort?
For several minutes, nothing happened. The van just idled. As best she could tell, no one had gotten out. They were just sitting there. Why? What was going on? Were they waiting for something or someone?
Through the hood, she could hear voices coming from the cab, Chrissie and the boyfriend. It sounded like they were arguing. There was a crescendo as Chrissie, who must have been driving, punctuated her words by throwing the van into reverse and stepping on the accelerator.
The tires spun wildly, before finally biting into the dirt and finding purchase. And that’s when it happened.
Just as the van was beginning to back up, something slammed into it from behind. Hard.
CHAPTER 24
As soon as he saw the van’s reverse lights come on, Bob McGee knew he was going to get blown. He’d never be able to reverse his own vehicle fast enough, much less turn around and find a place to hide. There was only one way he could hope to turn this to his advantage and he took it. Slamming the gas pedal to the floor, he aimed right for it.
The force of the impact sent the van skidding sideways. Before its occupants knew what had happened, McGee was out of his 4Runner, 1911 pistol in hand, rushing the cab.
In the less than three seconds it took him to get there, both the male passenger and female driver had scrambled for their weapons and were about to bring them up high enough to fire at him. Big mistake.
McGee killed them both with two .45-caliber rounds to the chest and one to the head fired in rapid succession. The shots from his 1911 echoed through the wooded area like thunder.
After inserting a fresh magazine he took better cover and yelled, “Lydia! Can you hear me? Lydia!” There was no response. Cautiously, he crept forward and, grasping the handle, slid the door back.
He found her, still hog-tied and up against the side of the van. Taking off her hood, he peeled back the tape from across her mouth as gently as he could.
“Are you okay?” he asked as he pulled out his knife and cut her hands and feet free.
Ryan covered herself with her robe as McGee helped roll her into a sitting position. “I’m okay,” she said, pulling at the tape around her wrists. “What happened? Are they dead?”
“Yeah, they’re dead. Both of them.”
“How’d you find me?”
“They sent a team to my house, too. It’s a good thing I get up every two hours to piss or they might have gotten me also. I tried to call your cell.”
Ryan shook her head. “I needed some sleep. It was turned off.”
“Well, when you didn’t answer I rushed to your place. Got there just as they were loading you into the van.”
“Why didn’t you do something?”
McGee put up his hands. “I needed to make sure there wasn’t a tail-gunner or some sort of support team in a follow car.”
“Why didn’t you PIT them to get them to spin out or run them off the road?”
“And have the van flip over? Something told me they probably didn’t take the time to put a seat belt on you. Listen, I picked my moment. They’re dead and you and I are both alive.”
He was right. “Who the hell are they?”
McGee held up his index finger indicating he’d be right back. Stepping out of the cargo area, he moved back to the cab, and after making sure both of the occupants were dead, he conducted a quick search. He returned to the cargo area with a black duffle bag, which he set on the floor and opened up.
“Two H&K MP5s, two Glock 19s, a couple of Tasers, duct tape, power bars, some water bottles, a cell phone, which is probably a burner and won’t lead anywhere, and enough ammo to take on a small Latin American army.”
“But no ID?” asked Ryan.
“No.”
“So they’re pros.”
McGee nodded.
Ockham’s razor. The simplest explanation was usually correct. They had come after both of them. But before today, there wasn’t anything that she and McGee shared that somebody could want to kill them over. All of that had changed since she had confronted Durkin. This wasn’t a coincidence. This had to be tied to him. She could feel it. “Did you see any books?” she asked.
“Books?”
“A paperback of some sort.”
“Now that you mention it,” said McGee, as he returned to the front of the van.
Ryan could hear him open the cab. “Durkin liked to use them for codes,” she said, loud enough for him to hear. “French lit translated into English. Rousseau or some author like that.”
McGee returned and tossed an aged paperback to her. “Balzac.”
“Damn it. It is Durkin, then.”
“Or,” McGee said, his voice trailing off.
“Or what?”
“Or this is bigger than either of us thought and Johnson is involved, too.”
Ryan looked at him. “The DNI? You’ve got to be joking. I thought he was someone you trusted.”
“At this point, you’re the only one I trust. And until we get to the bottom of this, that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
She winced as she pulled the last piece of duct tape from her arm. “Why’d they drive me all the way out here?”
“It’s as good a place as any to dump a body. Or maybe even two bodies. When I rolled up, they were trying to signal someone with their headlights but I never saw anyone signal back. They waited a while and either got spooked or decided to move to Plan B.”
“Who do you think they were signaling?”
“I don’t know; maybe this was a rendezvous with the team who came gunning for me.”
“Did the men at your house have guns,” Ryan asked, “or Tasers?”
“Both. Why?”
“Because if they’d wanted to kill us, they would’ve. Why bother giving Tasers to a wet-work team?”
“Lots of reasons.”
“No,” she disagreed. “This has to be about the Jordanians. It’s the only reason we’d both be targeted. And I told Durkin everything. There’s nothing he could gain from interrogating me. He knows all of it already.”
“What if he wanted to know who else you might have told about the Jordanians?”
“Then he could have asked me. Listen, the only reason Durkin
could possibly have to snatch me alive is that he wanted to kill me someplace else other than my apartment. And apparently, he didn’t want me to die alone, which means he had something cooked up to explain why you and I died out here together in the middle of nowhere.”
“Did you tell Durkin you were going to talk to me?” asked McGee.
“No.”
“Then that would mean he had a tail on you. So, he not only knows that you talked to me, but that we talked to Johnson. How could he hope to get away with killing us?”
“I hate to say it, but either you’re right and Johnson’s involved, or Durkin came up with something so airtight, he was convinced our deaths could be explained away without even the DNI asking any questions. Either way, I don’t think you and I were supposed to walk out of here tonight.”
“I think you’re right. So now what?”
“Now we get the hell out of here,” replied Ryan as she grabbed one of the MP5s from the bag and moved toward the door.
McGee extended her his hand to help her exit, and then gathered up the duffle. “What should we do about the van and the bodies?” he asked.
Ryan looked inside the cab. In addition to the two corpses slumped over in their seats, the cab was splattered with blood and pieces of brain. “If we had enough time to clean it up and make it look like we took their people hostage, I’d say let’s opt for that. But all we’ve got time to do now is burn it. Let’s burn the entire thing.”
McGee nodded and after throwing the duffle in his 4Runner, he backed it a safe distance away. While he got to work on the van and prepared to set it on fire, Ryan walked over to the spot from where he had been shooting. With a flashlight from his glove box, she began looking along the dirt road for the shell casings from his 1911.
It took several minutes, but she was able to locate all six. “Got ’em,” she said as she pocketed the last one. “You ready?”
