by Dale Mayer
Afterward was a whole different story. Still he was hoping to not be the one to handle the police. He didn’t have a whole lot of patience for that process.
But he’d do what he had to do. They all would. A third buzz came through. He held it up for her to read.
In a low voice, she whispered, “Two down.” She turned and stared at him. “We counted two in the house. Do you think there’s more?”
He shrugged. “We’ll know in a few minutes.”
She reached up a trembling hand and gently stroked his face. “Thank you.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “For what?”
“For everything. For helping me in Afghanistan, for coming back with me. For bringing all these people in. For following my father, trying to help him.” She gave a broken laugh. “There’s no way I’ll be able to repay you.”
He closed her mouth with a gentle nudge of her chin. “No repayment necessary. There are some good guys in the world.”
She searched his gaze as if looking for the truth and then gave a beautiful slow smile that made his heart race. “There might be good guys,” she said, “but I haven’t been very lucky meeting them.”
He smiled. “And maybe your luck just changed.”
He reached down against his better judgment—knowing it was so not the time but unable to resist the wet lips in front of him—and gave her the gentlest kiss.
His phone buzzed. “Let’s go,” he said. “House is clear.”
“Did they find my father? Did they find anybody else?”
“Two more men down.” He turned and shot her a hard look. “And, yes, to your father. But he’s not in very good shape.” He watched the color drain from her face. He grabbed her hand and said, “Don’t faint on me. Your father needs you.”
She shook her head. “I’ve never fainted in my goddamn life. Right now, I’m wishing to hell they hadn’t knocked all four men down. I’d punch one or two myself.” And she raced into the house ahead of him.
The rear door was open and showed a kitchen. At the landing to the stairs, he stepped in front and led the way. He went up to the second floor to the bedroom on the left to find both Easton and Ryder there. And on the bed, curled up in a fetal position, was her father.
“Oh, my God! Daddy.”
Chapter 15
And on at that note, things went to hell. She spun and said, “He needs medical attention and now.” She pulled her phone out and dialed 911.
When she finished with the call, she turned and looked at Devlin. “What do we tell the police?”
The three men exchanged glances and asked, “The truth?”
“And our excuse for not calling them right away?”
“Think fast,” Devlin said. “The ambulance is almost here.”
She stared at him in surprise. “It must’ve been around the corner then.” She ran downstairs to let them in.
The ambulance parked out front of the house. Two men jumped out, the first racing toward her.
“He’s upstairs to the left.”
The paramedic ran up the stairs. The second man unloaded a stretcher from the back of the ambulance.
She ran upstairs to see the paramedic checking her father over. The stretcher arrived. All four of them were quietly told to leave the room.
Her father was loaded up, covered with a blanket and strapped down.
Within minutes they had him moved downstairs and in the back of the ambulance.
Bristol hopped up in the back and said to Devlin, “I’ll call you when I get to the hospital.”
He nodded. “We’ll wait for the police.”
She shot him a grateful look, jumped back out, threw her arms around him and gave him a kiss before climbing back into the ambulance. The doors shut, and they were gone, sirens blaring, lights flashing.
Sending a last wave through the window, she turned her attention to her father and the man leaning over him.
But he was sitting beside her now, a needle in his hand. “Nice of you to join us, Bristol McEwan.” And he slid the needle into her arm.
*
Devlin stared at the ambulance as it disappeared from sight. He shook his head and turned to find Ryder and Easton, staring at him, huge grins on their faces.
“What?”
Ryder said, “Yep, Mason’s luck struck again.”
He stared at them in surprise, then frowned. “Like hell,” he said good-naturedly. “This has got nothing to do with that.”
“No course not.” Easton smirked. “Wait until the others hear about it.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” he snapped. “Where the hell are the cops? The 911 call went out. Doesn’t that mean everybody, fire truck, ambulance, and police? Why was there only one ambulance?”
Just then he heard the cops in the distance. He rolled his eyes. “Finally our city’s finest doing their job.”
“Go easy on them. You don’t know where the hell they’re coming from.”
Devlin nodded. “True enough.” He tried to calm down. “We need to track down who the hell was behind this kidnapping. Did you guys happen to get any ideas from the men upstairs?”
“Pictures and a couple IDs,” Ryder said easily. “I sent everything to Mason and Ice. They’re looking into who they are.”
He nodded. “Good. Once the police are involved, we’ll get hit for information.”
“True enough.”
Two cruisers pulled up and parked out front. The cops opened the doors, walked over and said, “You called 911?”
“Bristol did,” Devlin said. “The ambulance got here ahead of you. She left with the injured man. We got four men down in the house.”
“Four men down?” the officer asked, his voice turning ugly. “And who dropped them. Are they dead?”
“We dropped them. No, they’re not dead. They’re the ones who kidnapped the old man who just left in the ambulance.”
Another siren split through the air, and an ambulance screamed around the corner and parked on the opposite side of the road. Another ambulance? Devlin shook his head. “You guys are late. The other ambulance already got here.”
The medic looked at him and said, “What? We’re the only ambulance available. Everybody’s off on a call on the bad multicar pileup on the I5.”
Devlin stared at him. He could feel the color bleaching from his face. He pulled out his phone, his gaze going hard right to Ryder and Easton. “I sure as hell hope you’re wrong,” he snapped. “Otherwise the goddamn kidnappers had an ambulance ready to take the father away, and now they’ve kidnapped both of them.”
“You better start at the beginning. Who the hell is it that’s been kidnapped?”
Devlin stared at the officer as he was dialing Bristol’s phone. “Bristol McEwan, and her father, Jerome. They’re both military weapon designers.”
The policemen’s eyebrows rocketed upward. “And you think this is connected to their work?”
Devlin nodded. “I know it is.” He held the phone to his ear. In a low voice he whispered, “Come on, Bristol. Answer your goddamn phone.”
But no answer came.
In shock, he turned to face his men. “She’s not answering.”
“Try it again. There could be lots of reasons why she’s not.”
“Right.” None of them were good. But that didn’t mean her father hadn’t taken a turn for the worse, and she wasn’t hovering over him. A buzzing phone was hardly a priority at that moment. He quickly redialed and held the phone to his ear. His heart pounded against his chest, and his fists clenched as he waited. Suddenly the call was answered.
“Bristol? Are you okay?”
“Bristol is fine,” said a man, his voice unfamiliar to Devlin. “For the moment. And as long as you don’t follow us.”
And then he hung up.
Devlin groaned, his heart clenching with fear. “They’ve got her. We actually handed over the father and daughter. They have kidnapped both of them.”
Chapter 16
Bristol awoke, feeling groggy and disoriented. She lay still for a moment, her mind grappling with the new reality—one of pain and confusion. She wanted to move, but this voice screamed through her head that said, Lie still. She didn’t know whose voice it was or if it was her own subconscious—but it was strong enough to keep her still.
She lifted her lids ever-so-slightly. She was in danger and had no reason why. Her mind struggled to put the jumbled memories back in the right order. Her father had been taken. Devlin and she followed him with the swallow. They’d found the house and her father. Relief washed through her at that. Surely whatever happened after that couldn’t be all that bad.
And that’s when she remembered the rest. The needle, the look on the man’s face as he shoved the needle deep into her arm, and the panic and fear as she slowly slid sideways, unable to help herself. She remembered the last cry in her mind as she called out for Devlin. Not only had her father not been saved, they’d both been taken.
When she thought about the sequence of events, she realized no police had shown up. Just an ambulance. Then how else would one cart an unconscious man around? Particularly if they’d been forced to drug him.
Or if he needed medical assistance. But she highly doubted these ambulance attendants had any medical training. They were just the same as the other men. Men who would do anything for a price. Men who didn’t give a shit about the chaos they created or the pain and destruction they left in their wake.
Her body rolled with an odd movement. She opened her eyes wider to see she was laying on a bed, her father beside her. No, not a bed—more like a bench. She had no idea where she was. Outside of her father, nobody else appeared to be in the room. She rolled over to her back and frowned. She was inside a boat. Maybe the main cabin. She could see sunshine outside and graying skies. And yet she could hear traffic. Then she understood. She and her father had been stashed inside a boat towed on a trailer.
Considering she was on a boat, were they heading for the harbor? That was not good. Once they hit the shore, headed out to international waters, it would be even harder to escape.
She tried to move her arms and realized her hands were tied. No, they were taped. She studied the tape around her wrists and realized the abductors hadn’t expected to run into her. They’d taken her father, who didn’t need anything to keep him immobilized, but they’d had to improvise with her, using medical tape, and it was damn tight. She glanced around, looking for something to cut it with. Her thoughts forewarned her, if she was inside the boat, were the bad guys watching her? She searched for a camera. Thankfully she didn’t find one.
As she sat up, she realized her feet were tied with the same type of tape. She pulled her knees up to her chest and with her nails tried to scratch and rip the tape around her ankles, but it was too tough. She needed something sharp. A kitchen was down here. She doubted she’d be able to find anything, not if her captors were smart. But she had to look. Likely they thought she’d sleep the whole journey, but her body reacted differently to most medications.
She slid her feet down to the floor and although woozy and unsteady with the jolting movement as they traveled, she hopped her way to the galley. And sure enough, although she found no knives, there were various other instruments. One looked like a meat fork. She grabbed it, sat down on the floor, and stabbed at the tape. Anything that would break the integrity of the material would allow it to be ripped apart easily. In less than a minute, the bindings on her ankles gave way. The trouble was her bound hands would be a little bit harder to get to.
How did one stab something holding the hands together tightly? She reversed the tool, and with her feet together holding the fork, she plunged her hands up and down against the prongs. Several times she stabbed herself, but she persisted.
Panic started to set in. How long had she been gone? Had Devlin figured it out yet?
As soon as her hands were free, she found the chip below her elbow and, with a great deal of pain, pressed down on it hard. An alert button should send a signal back to her central control. With any luck, Tesla or Ice might see it.
She didn’t have the swallow with her; it was back in the car with Devlin. Did he have enough knowledge to switch over the programming? Tesla should know. Bristol had left the instructions with them. She shook her head. But she hadn’t taught anyone. It never occurred to her that she’d also be kidnapped.
Now free, she grabbed a napkin and pressed against the blood flowing from her skin. She didn’t bother cleaning up the blood droplets on the floor. If anything happened to her, that trace of evidence might help fill in the trail of her abduction.
Back on her feet, she made her way to her father. He appeared to be unconscious, but from the state of his skin and the lax way his body laid, she figured he’d been drugged. She reached out a hand and gently brushed the wispy white hair off his forehead.
She considered how to contact somebody. Anybody. She peered out the window to see traffic going by. Lots of traffic. How the hell would she get somebody’s attention? Quickly she searched the cabin, looking for anything that would help. There wasn’t much.
She went back to the tape that had been her bindings and ripping apart the multiple rounds they had used, and with a black pen, she taped the word Help! on the window. She’d already checked her pockets. Her cell phone was gone, and her father didn’t have anything on him either. Although the cabin appeared to be wired with radios, she didn’t see any electronics she could put together to contact anybody. Neither could she see what vehicle was pulling the boat.
She went to the cabin door and tried to open it, but it appeared to be chained shut from the outside. Of course, it was probably just locked. She ran back to the galley, grabbed the meat fork, went back to the door and worked on getting it open. The fork broke off in her efforts, both pieces falling to the floor. If this didn’t work, she would start smashing windows. On the third try, something gave way. She propped open the door and slowly climbed to the deck. She waved frantically, screaming for help. As the traffic roared past, several people stared at her in surprise from inside their vehicles.
She screamed, “Help! Help me please.”
She saw several people grabbing their phones, but she had no idea how long it would take before anybody came to her rescue. She dashed back inside, checked on her father, grabbed the sheet that covered him, and quickly took it outside, flinging it up and down in the air. If there was ever a universal sign of distress, it was the white flag.
Just then the truck pulling the boat slowed, and she realized she may have caught their attention too. Turn signals blinked on the truck, and it turned right. She screamed louder and harder, and hoped somebody had called in the license plate number, if there was one. She had to do something fast. If she found a place to jump off, then she would take it.
Only … how could she leave her father behind?
*
Devlin set the swallow on top of the car, the laptop beside it. “Tesla, I don’t understand what I’m doing here.” He’d been following instructions to send the swallow back up again; thankfully all the programs had been left open. “She also said she had the same tracker.”
Tesla, in a calm voice, said, “As long as she has it on, we can track her right now.” She gave him careful details on how to start the program.
When the swallow lifted in the air beside him, both Easton and Ryder stepped back, whispering, “Whoa.”
Devlin realized he was finally getting somewhere. He took another couple steps, and the swallow shot off into the distance.
“It’s gone, but where the hell is it?”
Behind him, Ryder said, “I’m driving. Easton, sit in the front.”
They helped get Devlin and the laptop into the back of the Jeep.
In his ear he could hear Tesla asking, “Can you get to the GPS page she had open?”
He quickly tabbed through until he found the program he was looking for. “Yes, it’s here, and some blinking thing is in the center.”
<
br /> “Check the beep and tell me what the number is.”
He gave her the numbers that showed up.
“Okay, that’s her father’s tracker. Can you see any kind of location?”
He remembered Bristol tracking the GPS coordinates. He moved the coordinates into Google Maps and said, “They’re heading toward the harbor.” He quickly gave the street name to Ryder, and within seconds, they were headed down the highway.
Devlin tried to stay calm and kept an eye on the tracker.
“Ice is beside me,” Tesla said. “She said there’s chaos on one of the highways. Apparently a woman is in the back of a boat with a sheet, screaming for help.”
Devlin raised his gaze and stared blindly out the windshield ahead of him. “A boat. It would certainly be a unique camouflage.”
“Reports are coming in from all over the place. She taped the word Help! on one of the windows. We don’t know if it’s connected. We’re trying to get an image, but she doesn’t have satellite here. We’re connecting through the compound. Levi’s setting it up.”
Devlin shared the information with the men in the front.
“So they transferred her from the ambulance to a boat?” Easton asked. “It’s not bad. Boats have space below. It would hold her father, and if she was unconscious, they had a place to put her too. Obviously she’s woken up, and, if they’d restrained her, she’s gotten loose.”
“Yeah,” Ryder said. “What do you think they’ll do to her when they see she’s out in the back of the damn boat, shaking a white sheet?”
Silence descended in the Jeep. They all knew exactly what would happen to her.
“We won’t give them that chance,” Devlin said in a hard voice. “We must find them before they separate. If she gets off that boat, we have the tracker for him, but not for her.”
“She has a number for herself, right?” Easton asked.
“Yes, Tesla’s trying to find it.”
“Jesus. People are being microchipped now but way back when? Who thought such a thing was even possible.”
“It happens in wealthier families. In this case her father was involved in big military warfare experiments. And he’d had one put in her when she was a toddler.”
