Jack Be Quick_An Iniquus Romantic Suspense Mystery Thriller

by Fiona Quinn

  She focused on the pictures. The first one was of Rebeca, Ari, and Caleb Levinski cheesing it up for the camera. The second one was of Ari and Caleb looking like they were asleep in the seat of a mini-van. In the third, the boys were squatting in the mud, dirty and wild-eyed.

  “Where did you get these photographs of the children?” she asked, not understanding their import.

  “The Levinski children have been of interest to us for quite a while. But they suddenly became relevant.”

  Suz knew the cryptic-speak were code words for something, but she just didn’t understand.

  “We think that it would be a very good idea, for your good health and that of these children that you cooperate by answering my questions.”

  “If I can. . .”

  “You can, and you will.” Jones leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee, looking perfectly comfortable.

  “I’m sorry, let me re-phrase. If I have any information, I will tell you. If I don’t have the information, well then obviously, I can’t tell you.”

  Jones dipped his head left and then right as if weighing her words. “That sounds fair enough.” He glanced up and number two was coming in with a tray that held a steaming tea pot and a plate of cookies. He set it on the coffee table and said something in a foreign language to Jones. Jones responded in that same dialect. Suz tried to puzzle out what language they were speaking, it sounded vaguely Russian. That’s as far as she got. None of the words stood out as familiar.

  The other man left then came immediately back with another tray with her lunch on it. Jones swept an open hand toward the tray as the other man brought it over and set it on her lap. He too was wearing the thin black gloves.

  “Please, it seems that we’ve interrupted your lunch. Enjoy.” He spread his colorless lips in what might have been an attempt at a smile. Suz fought her desire to shutter. She looked down at the stew; she had absolutely no appetite. But to show her good intentions of being cooperative, until she could find a way to escape this mess, she offered up her own semblance of a smile and took a bite.

  Jones waited for her to finish every last painful morsel on her plate, then he nodded at the other-man. The other-man immediately stepped forward and took the tray.

  Jones leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers loosely interlaced, and his cold-fish stare. “Let’s begin.”

  Suz gripped the arms of her winged back chair. What did that mean? Her mind went to interrogation scenes in movies where the man would take out a cloth and unroll it on the table, revealing his torture tools. She stopped breathing.

  “How long have you worked with the CIA?”

  The question caught her off guard. She stared at the man as if he were mad. Her brain tried to churn through the situation and what it came up with was a burst of laughter. “What?” she sputtered.

  The man turned his head slightly as the other-man handed him a piece of her stationary. He glanced at it. “Dearest Jack.” Jones attempted to smile again. “This is your boyfriend?”

  Jack! “My ex-.”

  “You always write dearest to your ex-?”

  Suz had trouble holding eye contact with the man. She found herself staring at the stationary instead. “He doesn’t know he’s an ex- yet, I was writing the letter to tell him.”

  “Ah, I see. And dearest Jack is also the Captain Jack that your students are speaking of on the television.”

  Suz nodded and swallowed.

  “He set up your great escape. He is a military man, a captain, huh? A special operative?”

  “He’s not a captain, no. I was very afraid after Sandy Hook. . .”

  “Yes, this was a very loving gesture, putting into place these plans so you would be safe. He did a superlative job by all accounts. I wonder how he knew what to do? Where he got his supplies. He must be special operative, no?”

  “He isn’t with the military, no.” Suz saw Jones tweak his head and knew he didn’t believe her. “But he used to be in the Navy. He left the service years ago. That’s why they called him Captain, like the Gordon’s fisherman. You know, a guy on a boat.”

  “A fisherman in the navy? A SEAL then?”

  “In his dreams he is.” That was completely truthful, but she thought the bitterness in her words sounded a whole lot like sarcasm, and she thought that was probably how Jones read it. “Right now he’s not working. He’s disabled. As a matter of fact, he just came out of yet another surgery. They were trying to fix his knee.”

  “And yet you are willing to leave the relationship when he is in recovery?”

  “I’ve done all I can. I’m wrung out. I just can’t be part of his life anymore.”

  “You have an engagement ring on your right hand. You planned to marry him?”

  “No, he asked. He wanted me to hang on to the ring and think it over. And I decided to give it back and end the relationship. It’s on my right hand until I can give it to him.”

  Jones held out his hand.

  Suz stared at the open palm, then realizing what he wanted, she pulled off the ring and handed it to him.

  “It is a very large diamond. Two carats? Three? This must be worth more than fifty-thousand dollars.”

  “I…I wouldn’t know.”

  “How would he get this kind of money, a disabled veteran?”

  “Well the stone was his grandmother’s. . . so he didn’t buy it. He bought the setting for me. That shouldn’t have cost him much.” What a weird conversation this was.

  The other-man came back and spoke to Jones in their foreign language.

  “Come, I have a question for you.” Jones stood and opened his leather-clad palm to indicate the hallway to her bedroom. Those gloves – Suz had been scared for other people’s safety, scared for her students yesterday, and Ari and his brother in those photos. Those photos scared her. She was scared for Jack all the time. . . but she had never been scared like this for herself before.

  Her bedroom felt too intimate a place, too far from an exit, she hesitated.

  “Please,” Jones countered with a slight uptick in inflection which Suz herself used when she wasn’t giving her students any choices.

  Jones had placed the engagement ring in his pants’ pocket and then swung in to walk behind her. They walked to her closet. She had taken out her suitcase and her summer box of clothes and was packing for her trip Thursday – it was something to do to keep her mind busy on things other than her broken heart.

  The other-man pointed to the corner where she stored her birthday bag from Jack.

  “This is a go-bag,” Jones said.

  “It’s a zombie bag,” Suz countered to her own amazement.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you watch Day of the Dead, on TV? It’s about the end of civilization because there’s an epidemic that turns people into zombies. If that ever happened that’s my bag to get out of Dodge and flee the hoards. It was a birthday gift.”

  “Out of Dodge,” Jones said then turned and conferred with the other-man who seemed to explain the idiom. That meant the other-man also understood English. Suz wondered why he had only conversed with this guy in their language. “Ah, and you packed this bag? Or did Captain Jack?”

  “Jack did. As my birthday present.”

  Jones had her take it out of the closet and open it. She unzipped the top flap that had the solar panels attached, and she lifted it up. There, in various holsters, was a gun, a machete, a big knife-like soldiers use, a large canister of mace, and a stun gun.

  “You are as they say, ‘loaded for bear,’” Jones commented.

  Suz looked up at him. “Who says that?”

  “Take the gun out,” Jones said.

  Suz reached out her thumb and forefinger and slid the gun out of the holster, leaving the pistol on the bag.

  “It has a magazine inserted already. Is there a bullet in the chamber?”

  Suz looked down at the gun, then up at the ceiling. “’Bullet in the chamber’ that means that the slide was
racked, and a bullet was pushed up and ready for the trigger.” There was a window on the gun, Jack had shown her. She leaned over the Ruger and looked down, seeing nothing. She gingerly flipped it over and peered down again. There, just in front of the grip, she could see a little bit of brass. “Yes, there’s a bullet there,” she said.

  “Good. Lift the gun and point it at my colleague.”

  Suz looked at him and blinked.

  “I wish you to point the gun at my colleague. He is here without your invitation. He has, in effect, broken into your home. Lift the gun and point it at him.” The growl was a command.

  Suz vibrated from head to foot as she sat back on her heels, reached out for the gun, and wrapped it in her fingers. She had to process through the grip. It had been a long time since Jack had tried to teach her how to use it. Her index finger laid on the outside of the trigger guard. She lifted the gun and found the other-man’s chest at the end of her sights. Her hands shook uncontrollably, swinging the barrel in a disjointed pattern. She panted, her jaw dropped down, her tongue didn’t feel like it fit properly in her mouth.

  “Shoot him,” Jones said softly.

  Suz did nothing but quiver.

  “Shoot him,” Jones’s voice suddenly boomed out with such authority that her brain seemed to want to short circuit her own decision making and hand its power over to the foreigner in her bedroom.

  Her stomach dropped. Releasing the gun, Suz raced for the bathroom where she was just in time to lift the lids and vomit up the orange couscous.

  10

  JACK

  20:30 Hours, Tuesday, Feb. 15th

  Suburban Hospital, Bethesda, Md.

  “Lynx have you talked to Suz?” Jack’s face looked slightly pixilated over Skype.

  “Not since Monday night at the safe house. I’ve had my nose in this case, trying to figure out where the Levinski children were taken.” She was standing in Striker’s kitchen at the Iniquus barracks, making a sandwich. She was multi-tasking. Checking in on Jack, grabbing a quick bite, and then a shower. After that she planned a thirty-minute power nap, then back on the trail of those boys who disappeared into thin air.

  “Any luck?”

  “Nada. You were asking about Suz. Hasn’t she—” Lynx reached out to grab at the wall behind her, her feet widened in stance, and she bent her knees as if she were surfing a high wave and working to maintain her balance. “Holy moly,” she whispered.

  “What’s that Lynx?”

  “Jack be nimble Jack be quick,” she muttered like she was casting an incantation.

  “The timing on that text couldn’t have been any better. Thank you. That jump saved my life.”

  “No – oh. Holy hell. Your jump off the building was serendipitous.” Lynx squatted down on the floor, not even bothering to move to a chair. She leaned her back into the wall and pulled her knees to her chest.

  “Are you okay?” Jack pushed up in his bed. “Move the screen so I can see you better. What are you doing on the floor?”

  Lynx pulled the ThinkPad down to her lap. Her face had blanched. “My texting that to you – the timing—that was a stroke of good luck.”

  “I’d agree. But I’m still not following. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Lynx blinked as she looked like she was trying to get her thoughts to line themselves up. “Holy moly,” she said again as the enormity of some discovery seemed to hit her hard. “I texted you my sixth sense warning when it came to me. And you read it as an immediate danger.”

  “Which it was.”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “How can you say that – the building exploded as my feet hit the car roof.”

  “The warning wasn’t about you being in danger on that building.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah – that’s the fricking nature of my psychic knowings, isn’t it? They don’t truly make sense until I’m interpreting them in hindsight. But this I can tell you, that message definitely wasn’t meant to prod you off that roof. Just – well, thank God it did. It was a bonus.”

  “A bonus,” he deadpanned. “What was it about then?”

  “Someone else – something else. You need to intervene.”

  “Lynx I’m really not following you. These pain meds. . .”

  “If the knowing I heard ‘Jack be nimble Jack be quick Jack jump over the candlestick’ was about the rooftop blowing and your jumping, I wouldn’t have the warning come up again. It just hit me between the eyes. Hard.”

  Jack looked at her, stunned. “Jeezus, Lynx! I jumped off a three-story building when I read that.”

  “I know! I’m sorry. Wait. No. I’m not sorry. It saved your life. So maybe it was a two-for. . .” Lynx turned her head this way and that as if using an antenna to hone in on something. “No it’s definitely not over, and it’s definitely not you who’s in trouble. You have to jump.”

  “That’s kind of cryptic, Lynx. And I think my jumping days are over, at least in the near future. A couple months until I can actually jump. Do you think this knowing is literal?”

  “I hope not.” Lynx leaned her head back, staring up at the ceiling. “Let’s stop and think. What were we talking about when the knowing hit me? Ah, we were talking about Suz. . .”

  “Suz? What about her?” Jack’s face pushed toward the camera, filling the entire screen.

  “I don’t. . .” Lynx shook her head.

  “Come help me get up. Now!”

  “But—”

  “Now, or we aren’t friends.” Jack emphasized the threat by closing the lid on his computer, effectively ending the conversation without a good-bye. Something he never did.

  It was less than an hour later that Lynx walked into the hospital room with a backpack slung over her shoulder. She looked exhausted. “Jack, I am so conflicted I don’t know what to do. Here, I brought you a bag so at least you can cover up your backside.”

  “Thanks.” Jack picked up the bag, hoisted himself out of bed, and propelled into the bathroom on his crutches with his leg locked out straight. He left the door open as he dug through the kit.

  Lynx sat with her back to the door.

  “What’s the conflict?” he called as he leaned into the wall, so he could pull on a pair of boxer briefs.

  “Last time you were in here, after your brush with Satan and death, you released yourself from the hospital against medical advice. The Iniquus Command were pretty ticked at you, as you’ll recall.” She turned around to catch his eye then blinked and quickly turned her head back to the wall “Sorry,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Now, granted, it was for a good reason. You were part of the team that took down Striker’s kidnapper, and you helped to save our company. But still, Command warned you against your cowboy behavior. You were told that doctors’ orders were the same as orders from your superior and disobeying them would be viewed as insubordination which is a terminable offense. If you pack up and leave without some doctor okaying this, you could be fired.”

  “I can’t get Suz to answer the phone it goes to voice mail. She’s not answering my texts.” His brace was laying across the sink, and Jack stiffened his muscles to keep his leg straight. He had pulled a t-shirt over his head and was now struggling with his pants. As he grunted and banged into the wall, Lynx moved into the bathroom to help.

  “To be fair, every person she’s known since birth, and their friends and relatives are all probably calling her to get a direct line on the scoop about what happened at her school. And you heard that she was outed as a CIA operative. Hound News may have it right; she could be in some black site to prevent her from telling the intel we have about upcoming attacks against children.” Lynx snorted she laughed so hard.

  “That’s not even close to being funny.”

  “Sit on the toilet, we’re going to have to work as a team to get these pants on you.” She helped lower him down. “It’s Suz. Suz who carries spiders outside and tells them to have a happy life, elsewhere. Suz who sobbed w
hen the stray cat she’d been feeding brought her a dead mouse as a thank you. Suz is . . . like chocolate chip oatmeal cookies and a glass of milk.”

  Jack tipped his head.

  “You know — warm, sweet, healthy to be around but not obnoxiously so. She brings a taste of normality to our lives – we all love her for that. She’s good stuff. Solid. And I for one look forward to the times I get to see her.”

  Jack nodded, and Lynx swiveled to catch Jack’s gaze. “But I have to be truthful, Suz was acting skittish when it came to talking to you.” She had both pants legs up around his thighs. “Suz made up something about being covered in dirt so she couldn’t come by the hospital – but it just didn’t read right body-language-wise. Since I took her to the safe house, I haven’t been able to reach her, either.” Lynx moved around to the other side of the toilet and put her cheek on Jack’s back, reaching around him for the waistband of his pants. “I do know that she called in to ask for her dogs to be brought back to her place and to tell us she was done using the safe house. Can you lift your weight onto your good foot and get your hips up?”

  Jack complied.

  Lynx shimmied the fabric over his butt and up to his hips. “Whew. There.” She stood up and brushed her hands together. “Okay, that call to Iniquus came in early this morning. Other than that, I don’t have anything. It could well be that she just needs some private time to process. Doing what she did at the school, experiencing what she experienced, it’s not part of most humans’ world. It can deflate you quick, and it takes time. . .”

  Jacked leaned back to access the zipper and snap and did them up. “You don’t sound like you believe that.”

  “Something’s off. I don’t know what. Is it attached to my knowing?” Lynx fitted the brace back into place over Jack’s grey camo BDUs, quiet for a moment while she aligned and clipped the many closures. “I have no clue – you know that my information system is kind of shitty until I’m looking in the rearview mirror. I feel like a broken record saying this, hindsight makes everything crystal clear.” She stood up to find Jack’s boots. “I had thought your quick exit strategy off the roof was actually what this had been all about.”