by Ken Fite
The reality was that someone had asked for filler music to be played while they figured out what was happening. Jami was somewhat relieved, knowing the music would buy some time. She wondered what the cable news talking heads were saying.
Three more men walked up to the two huddled together and joined the conversation. Jami flashed her badge as she approached. Chairwoman Stewart stayed where she was and made a call with her cell phone.
“Is it true? About Keller?” one of the men asked.
“Yes,” Jami admitted, “I need to know if you’ve seen anything out of the ordinary in the past few minutes.”
Her eyes jumped from face to face, desperately looking for any information they might have. One man spoke up.
“I just kicked a guy out about half an hour ago, right out here.” He pointed outside the doors to the front entrance to the arena. “David Mitchell. He was trying to get in with an invalid press pass. Paul here remembered him from a few nights ago when he was kicked out.”
“Where’d he go?” asked Jami. Just then, she heard someone in the crowd say that the news was reporting on Jim Keller. Jami looked back at the man she was talking to.
“He went out to the parking lot,” he said and pointed outside again.
NINE
DAVID MITCHELL SAT on his motorcycle and thought through his options. After being kicked out on the second night of the convention and not even making it past security tonight, he knew getting back into the United Center wouldn’t be possible.
He could see two officers at the side entrance from where he sat. For a moment, he considered the possibility of getting past them. Not a chance, he thought.
By now, all building security had surely been told about him trying to get inside. He wondered if there was another way he could get to Congressman Billings and confront him. He thought through the different scenarios in his head. He could try to catch him on his way to his car. He’d just get a no comment or, worse, completely ignored, he figured.
But Mitchell had proof that Billings was involved with giving a local Chicago-based business tax breaks that were based solely on his friendship with the owner. He had the document, the complaints from similar businesses who had come to Mitchell last month hoping he’d expose the congressman on his website. And Mitchell had hired a private investigator the last time the congressman was in town, who had captured pictures of Billings and the business owner dining at a high-end restaurant on Michigan Avenue.
Mitchell’s website had been a success. He’d broken a number of stories and made a name for himself similar to the Drudge Report on the other side of the aisle—independent journalism at its finest. No editors. No agendas, except for his own, maybe.
David Mitchell had hoped that tonight would be his shot to finally break this story at the height of the congressman’s career. Confronting him live, using a real-time video streaming app on his phone TMZ-style, and posting the footage on his website would have been so much more captivating than exposing the man through the written word. But it was looking like he had no other choice than to do just that.
Right before Mitchell was about to start his bike, he heard a loud noise in the distance near the arena. He snapped out of the funk he was slipping into and became fully present again. By instinct, he crouched while still sitting on his bike and positioned himself to be hidden behind the Chevy parked in front of him.
What he saw next confused him.
A man—a janitor—had busted through the exit, pushing a large black crate across the parking lot, and stopped behind a black Ford van that looked like something that might be used by a SWAT team. The windows were blacked out with dark tint, making it impossible to see inside.
Mitchell watched through the clear windows of the Chevy, lifting his head just high enough to see what was happening. What is this guy doing? Is he running from someone?
He soon had his answer.
A body! He’s pulling out a body from that crate! He watched as the janitor opened the two back doors of the van and pulled a gray-haired man in a business suit from the crate and pushed him inside the van. Mitchell thought the man looked like he was dead. Then he saw the janitor climb inside, holding something else in his hands. They’re handcuffs. He watched the janitor cuff the man and climb out.
The man lifted the crate and threw it in the back of the van before closing the doors and getting in. He pulled off so quickly his tires screeched for a moment, and it startled David Mitchell.
Without hesitation, Mitchell started his bike and followed the van at a distance and kept his headlights off.
TEN
I RAN DOWN the hallway and turned the corner, not sure what I expected to find. I definitely heard something. A clicking sound.
Past the turn, I saw that the hallway ended. “McGovern? Flynn? Do you copy?” I spoke into my earpiece as I ran. I was sure that the double doors would open to the entranceway where they were stationed. There was no response. “Do you copy?” I asked again.
“Blake, I’m headed there now,” I heard Jami say.
I slowed down as I approached the doors. I held my gun with my right hand, and with my left, I slowly depressed the door bar and pushed. It didn’t open. I tried the left one with the same result. Was the click that I heard someone locking the doors? Or gunfire? Or am I just paranoid—did I even hear a noise?
I backtracked, not knowing what I might find on the other side of the locked doors. I wasted at least two minutes going back to see if there was any other way out. There were two other doors on the opposite side of the hallway from the direction I had decided not to go in when I heard—or thought I heard—a sound.
Those doors opened up to an area being used by the stage crew. There were a few black crates scattered around. A dumping ground for all of the cases the audio equipment and other items used on stage were usually stored in. A couple of stagehands noticed me. They seemed shaken up to see me holding a gun.
“Federal agent,” I said and flashed my badge at them and reentered the hallway. Backtracking didn’t take a lot of time but more than I expected. Two, maybe three minutes tops. As I got back to the locked doors, I lifted my arm and grabbed the gun with my left hand to keep it steady. I aimed the gun where I thought the lock would be located. I fired twice and saw the right door loosen and open about an inch.
I kicked the door, still holding onto my Glock with both hands, and walked through the doorway. The two men I had stationed here were on the floor in a pool of blood. Their weapons were a few feet away from each of their bodies. It was the sound of shots firing that I heard.
I looked all around to make sure the room was clear and I put my hand to my earpiece. “McGovern and Flynn are down.”
Stepping over their bodies, I walked outside to see a blue motorcycle speed off. Up ahead of it was a van going just as fast as the bike. Jami ran around the corner. “That’s them!” she yelled.
Less than a minute later, we were in my black DDC-issued Tahoe and speeding south down Wood Street. I could no longer see the van, only the bike, and their headlights were off. Except for an occasional tap of the brakes, it was next to impossible to follow the van.
“How the hell did this happen?” I asked Agent Davis.
“You can’t put this on me. If you had stayed with the senator, we’d be in the same spot right now.”
I pushed the accelerator to the floor as I tried to keep up.
“They turned!” she yelled a second later.
I looked ahead and the bike was gone. I decided that they had turned west on Adams Street. I drove another block before turning right on Jackson to try to cut them off, and as we got close to Damen, we saw the bike pass us. I turned on my emergency lights and it took a few seconds to get the traffic to stop for us as we squeezed through the cars travelling on both sides of the road at Jackson and Damen. The bike sped off and disappeared.
I figured he’d gotten on the ramp to take I-290 east to downtown. We took the on-ramp and headed down the highway at over a
hundred miles per hour.
The roads were empty for a Thursday night and we couldn’t find the bike anywhere on the road. Was I wrong? Did he actually go straight?
In the heart of downtown Chicago, we exited at Wacker and got back on Congress and drove west to backtrack, hoping to catch a much-needed break. But we didn’t see the bike again. Our luck had run out. The bike was gone.
ELEVEN
SPEEDING THROUGH THE streets of southeast Chicago was not what David Mitchell had planned for tonight.
The stories he’d written for the various news organizations he worked for over the last nine years since graduating college had always been from the field, so being close to a story wasn’t anything new. Although he took a lot of heat and ultimately got fired for embellishing many of his stories, like adding that gunshots rang out from a drive-by while interviewing a local business owner about nearby gang violence when that never actually happened.
He wondered if anyone would even believe him about whatever it was that he was witnessing. After being busted for exaggerating the last story he’d written for the Tribune, he was given fifteen minutes to pack up his things and was escorted out of the building. Being fired for lying was hard to make a comeback from. No other paper would touch him. He had no choice but to start his own news website.
And that worked out perfectly fine for David Mitchell. It was all about him, anyway. He liked the attention his stories got him. He loved reading the emails and social media comments from his stories. He got a lot of hate mail, which he seemed to enjoy reading even more than his fan mail. For every hater, there’s a thousand fans out there that love me, he thought to himself.
The van Mitchell was following slowed as they reached a run-down industrial part of Chicago’s south side. He created a buffer between the van carrying the body of the older man and himself. He didn’t want to be seen or heard as they reached wherever it was they were going.
Mitchell drove into the old industrial park packed with office buildings that looked like they hadn’t been used in years. With the sun having set two hours earlier, it was hard to make out a lot of what he was seeing.
But from the dark streets, he could tell this wasn’t an area visited by very many people. Some of the buildings had driveways overgrown with grass or had junk cars parked in them.
He looked at the road behind him to make sure nobody was following. He felt goosebumps on his skin underneath his leather jacket and also felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Just as Mitchell turned a corner, his cell phone rang.
“This is Mitchell,” he said as he continued to follow the van from a safe distance.
“David, it’s John. Are you still at the United Center? Something’s happened.”
“What do you mean something’s happened?” David asked while trying to concentrate on the road.
“Senator Keller never gave his speech. He was supposed to go on at eight o’clock and never showed up.”
Mitchell didn’t know what to say.
“David? Did I lose you?” the caller asked.
“Let me call you back,” David said and hung up.
He realized in that moment that the driver of the van he was following was a kidnapper. And the gray-haired man in the business suit was Senator James Keller, nominee for President of the United States. My God, Mitchell thought to himself as he drove on.
He started to dial 911. I’ll be a hero, he thought as he envisioned his name all over the TV as the person who found and saved the kidnapped presidential nominee. Then other thoughts filled his head.
Mitchell thought about what might happen if he called this in and he wasn’t credited as the person who found the senator. It would be better to break the story himself and drip the information slowly, revealing more details every few hours to drive traffic back to his website.
Besides, he wasn’t a fan of Keller’s or anything he or his party believed in. Let him suffer a little, he thought and laughed to himself.
David Mitchell was now in complete control of the biggest story of his life.
TWELVE
THERE WAS A sound in the back of Victor Perez’s van as he approached the warehouse he’d been working from for the last two weeks. He looked over his shoulder and saw Jim Keller starting to come to.
“We’re almost there,” Perez said as the senator lifted his head and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what was happening.
Keller’s body was numb. He clenched his fists repeatedly, trying to regain feeling in them. Chloroform, he thought to himself. His vision was blurry and his hearing muffled. Keller couldn’t quite make out the words from the man driving the vehicle.
Perez pulled the van into the short loading dock of one of the abandoned warehouses and got out. He entered a code into a padlock and removed it, allowing him to lift a large bay door twenty feet long and fifteen feet high. He climbed back into the van, pulled it inside, and lowered the door again. Once inside the bay, he pushed a metal slider bar to the left of the door in place, locking it from the inside.
There was a lot of room inside the bay. The kidnapper had a generator running at the far end of the room, opposite the bay door. It powered six fluorescent lights in the ceiling, illuminating the bay, and powered two additional rooms inside the building that Perez would use for a workstation and prison cell. The rest of the dark and cold warehouse remained unused.
Victor Perez walked to the back of the van. He opened the doors and looked at the senator still trying to make sense of everything that was happening.
“Are you going to be a problem, Mr. Keller?” he asked, and the senator noticed an accent.
Keller’s body still felt numb. His limbs had the same uncomfortable tingling feeling as when they would fall asleep. It was difficult to move, but he managed to sit up.
“Screw you,” Keller said with a slur, and noticed his tongue had that same tingly feeling as the rest of his body, making it close to impossible to speak normally. Perez laughed and dug his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Keller watched the kidnapper intently, wondering if the madman was making himself comfortable on the chilly night or if he had something he was keeping hidden in one of the pockets.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” Keller managed to slur, eyes still fixed on his kidnapper.
“I already have,” Perez replied. From his right pocket, he revealed a small plastic black and yellow Taser gun. Keller saw that it was an X26. The kidnapper aimed it at the senator’s chest and squeezed the trigger. Two barbs pierced the senator’s white dress shirt and buried themselves deep into his skin.
An electric shock sent Keller into a convulsion on the van floor, and a moment later, he was unconscious again. Two droplets of blood started to appear and stained his shirt. Perez climbed into the van, uncuffed the senator, and dragged his body out. He pulled Keller inside the warehouse, where he handcuffed him once again, this time to a large metal pipe inside the crude cell he had created.
Perez stood back and thought through everything he’d done that night, retracing his steps to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He walked into the next room, adjacent to where the unconscious senator was slouched over on the floor and handcuffed to a pipe that ran from the ceiling all the way down to the floor of his new cell before curving toward the outside of the building.
He turned on a television that picked up one of the city’s local over-the-air stations. The FOX affiliate was simulcasting FOX News Channel programming. Perez changed the channel to NBC, which was broadcasting MSNBC coverage. He was thrilled to see the kidnapping had caused alarm and panic with the media.
THIRTEEN
IT WAS A strange feeling to be following a kidnapper into an abandoned industrial park. Dangerous, even. But David Mitchell was desperate to prove his worth as a journalist. This was a story that could help him show the world just how great he really was.
Mitchell had watched the black van turn one more time, travelling down what ended up being a dead-end str
eet. As he got to the corner and made the realization, he turned his engine off and walked the bike down a side alley and hid it behind an old rusted dark green dumpster between two decaying buildings.
As he walked back to the road with one streetlight illuminating the entire block, he heard what sounded like a garage door being pulled closed.
Where’d that sound come from? he asked himself as he stood on the crumbling concrete in the middle of the dead-end road. Slowly and ever so quietly, he inched his way past the buildings, looking for a sign—any sign—that might give a clue for which one hid the van and the senator.
Mitchell passed a few more brick buildings that looked like they might topple over should a strong wind pass through, and wondered to himself how the entire area had become so run-down. It was a sharp contrast to the buildings he used to walk past on his way to work on The Magnificent Mile, where the city’s ritziest hotels, restaurants, and businesses called home.
The temperature started to drop more rapidly after nightfall. David Mitchell’s heart pounded in his chest and he could hear the beating in his ears. The last time he was this on edge, he’d been out on assignment for an article he was trying to write on gang violence.
He had spent a day on the south side of the city where the King Cobras and the City Boys ruled the streets whenever the cops were out of sight. After walking the streets for an hour, he entered a diner to find some breakfast and also found his story.
Two City Boys walked in and pulled a gun on the cashier of The Eatery near Evergreen Park. The thug aimed the weapon around the room and looked about as scared as Mitchell.
He had a way of finding himself in the middle of every story, but always had to take things to the next level by adding unnecessary embellishments. In the gang article, he wrote that the older City Boy had roughed him up when in reality, he had remained quiet, arms folded, and stone-faced the entire time.
Even now, he thought about the best way to break this story. It needed to be done with flair.
