by Ken Fite
“You hear me, Jordan? How’d you know Senator Keller was being held at this location?”
I decided that telling the agent what I knew might help. At this point, I had nothing to lose. There was absolutely no way out of this. I decided I’d give him most of the information and ask to be included.
“I followed the clues. I tracked down a man who I thought might be involved. I got the address from him.”
The agent stopped pacing the floor and turned to me. “And who is this man?”
I shook my head. “He’s not involved. Listen, I’ll tell you everything I know, but you have to let me work with you. I can find Keller.”
“That’s not going to happen,” he replied.
There was a certain respect our agencies were supposed to maintain. Restraining each other wasn’t part of the rules of engagement that we followed. As head of DDC Chicago, being restrained was out of line. The FBI could trump us on decisions, but this was getting out of control.
“I’m the special agent in charge of DDC—let me go right now!” I yelled.
“You were,” the agent said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You were the special agent in charge. You’ve been relieved of your duties, Mr. Jordan. I’ve been asked to turn you over to Shapiro. After we’re done with you, that is.”
Just then, I heard footsteps coming from inside the bay. It was Jami. “Look what we found,” an agent said, walking behind her. Jami was handcuffed and told to have a seat next to me. “She had this on her,” the operative added and handed the flash drive over to the agent I’d been talking with.
Jami knelt down next to me. I kept my eyes on the man holding the flash drive and felt her eyes on me.
“I’m sorry, Blake,” Jami whispered.
FIFTY
THE MAN IN charge turned to Jami. “And who is this?” he asked.
“Agent Jami Davis, DDC,” she said before looking back at me.
He stepped closer and knelt down.
“What’s on the flash drive, Agent Davis?”
Jami shook her head slowly before responding, “I don’t know. We found it in the room next to us.”
The agent stood and started pacing the floor again. “Let me guess. Agent Jordan tried to distract us by letting us arrest him. That’s why he was here when we entered and not with you. He wanted us to find him so you could get away with this,” he said, holding the flash drive up in the air. “Is that about right?”
Jami looked down. I could see her eyes fixed on the metal pipe in front of us, and I wondered if she noticed the initials scratched into the pipe like I had.
“Sounds like obstruction of justice to me,” the man in charge said to us. “Maybe we can throw a tampering with evidence charge on there just for fun,” he added before giving one of the agents standing behind me an order. “Take them away,” he said, and the agent helped Jami and me get to our feet.
“You’re making a big mistake,” I said. “Let me help you. I know Keller better than anyone else here. The man’s a former SEAL. He would have left clues to help us find him,” I added and looked at Jami to see if she might know what I was talking about. She held her composure, but I saw a slight nod in response.
The agent took a step closer to us. “What you don’t seem to understand is we know everything you know. We’ll use one of the interagency satellites to retrace your steps and figure out where you came from before you drove here, which I’m assuming will be the person who gave you this address. We’ll keep retracing every step you took, all the way back to eight o’clock last night when Keller disappeared.”
I thought about Mitchell’s apartment. If he didn’t know already that I had the journalist’s laptop and cell phone, I figured he would after seeing that I had driven to the location. The FBI would eventually figure out that I would have had to have taken something from the apartment to get Burnett’s location.
That would be another count for tampering with evidence. I felt my body tense up at the realization.
The only way to avoid all of this would be to get back on the case. To convince them to let me help them. Not to save myself, but to buy some time so I could find Jim Keller before it was too late.
But the agent who showed up hoping to find the senator and now in charge of bringing me in wasn’t open to even considering it. There seemed to be nothing I could say or do to change his mind.
“Go,” he said to the operative standing behind Jami and me, and we started walking.
We were taken down the hallway and walked alongside the smear of Keller’s blood that lined the way. I glanced again inside the kidnapper’s room, knowing it would be the last time I’d see it, desperately looking for anything else that might tell me where the senator had been taken. We walked past the generator in the bay that was still running, and the agent walked us to his SUV and opened the back door.
He helped Jami inside and I followed. Then he slammed the door and walked back into the warehouse.
“Did you see it?” I asked Jami while we had a few minutes alone.
“Yes, ML—what do you think it means?”
I thought for a moment. “The FBI wasn’t tracking us. A kid was here with Keller for some reason. He escaped and called the police. Maybe it’s his initials.”
“Who do you think was tracking you?”
“Maybe DDC.”
“Maybe the kidnapper,” Jami added. “Blake, how are we going to get out of this?”
I looked out the backseat window. “I don’t know yet.”
FIFTY-ONE
JAMI AND I sat in the back of the SUV for a long time waiting for the agent to return. I was surprised that the FBI had left us together for so long. I started to wonder if it was done on purpose. Even though they said they hadn’t been monitoring me, I wouldn’t put that kind of thing past them. It didn’t matter now. They had caught me working a case they had explicitly asked me to stay out of. They had also caught me trying to take evidence from a crime scene. It couldn’t get any worse than this.
We watched as a Crime Scene Unit arrived at the warehouse and parked next to us. I saw a detective and a technician, two guys I knew and had worked with in the past, exit the van and glare at me as they walked inside, hauling their equipment to document and supervise the collection of evidence.
A minute later, the agent who had escorted us to the SUV showed up again. He started the ignition and we were off. He drove down Sayre and turned onto Sixty-Second and hung a left at New England. I looked out the passenger window and saw the doors of my truck open and the FBI searching every inch of it.
“That must be the kid,” Jami said. I turned my head and saw on the other side of the street a CPD patrol car. A teenager was leaned against it, pointing in the direction of the warehouse we had come from and talking with a Chicago policeman and one of the FBI agents.
The agent driving didn’t say a word to us. The man seemed upset about something, and I wondered what might have happened that Jami and I didn’t know about. He raised the volume of his police radio to better hear dispatch. The woman on the other end of the radio was communicating with agents in the field using police codes to help mask what they were talking about.
Dispatch calls law enforcement officers in the field every few minutes to ask for a status to make sure their agents are okay. They hadn’t yet called the man driving us, but I knew they would soon if he didn’t contact them first. I listened carefully to make sure I wouldn’t miss any communication between the agent and dispatch.
When I first started in this line of work, I’d let kids around the age of the teenager we drove past come along with me for what we called ride-alongs. They were always amazed at how we communicated over the radio. It sounded like gibberish to them, but with practice, new law enforcement officers picked up the lingo pretty easily. Dispatch wasn’t saying a lot, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the window.
“One-twenty-one to dispatch, I need a code 20 update on the 207,” the agent d
riving said with a shaky voice. I was startled and opened my eyes. A code 20 was a request for an update on a newsworthy event. Did I really just hear that? I thought to myself. What had happened to Keller?
“Dispatch 10-69,” the response came, acknowledging the request. A few seconds later, his cell phone rang.
“Hey, sir,” the agent said. Jami and I could hear the voice of another man talking on the other end of the line, but couldn’t hear the words over the road noise. “Tonight?” the agent said, and the caller continued speaking. “I understand. I’m almost there,” he said and disconnected the call.
“What happened?” I asked. It was the first time I had tried to talk with the agent. He didn’t acknowledge me. “Did something happen to the senator?” I asked, and the agent looked at me in the rearview mirror.
I saw him look back at the road, wearing aviator sunglasses—it was hard to read the expression on his face, but I could tell by the shaky voice that he was concerned about something, so much so that he couldn’t wait until he returned to get an update.
“I know who you are, Agent Jordan,” he said. “I respect you and what you do, but you know I can’t give you any information on this.”
FIFTY-TWO
WE ARRIVED AT the FBI’s Chicago office twenty minutes later. The agent driving took Interstate 55 to 290. The streets were now barren, a stark contrast to an hour earlier when Jami and I had fought our way past Midway traffic to get to the warehouse. When we drove through a checkpoint at Damen and Roosevelt, I knew that the city had been placed on a curfew and the citizens asked to stay off the roads.
The agent driving us pulled into the building. It was like a long carport that extended from one end of the building to the other. They had a fancier setup than we had at DDC, definitely more secure than ours. He stopped the car in the middle, stepped out, and opened our door. Two new agents took over from there.
Although I had driven by their building every day since it was so close to DDC, I had never been inside. As a spinoff from the CIA, we had access to their intelligence technology. We had tried to take the best from each agency when we formed DDC to be as effective as possible for handling domestic terrorism.
The FBI had a team of analysts out on the floor and a large screen on the wall like DDC, but instead of streaming video, it showed the entire Keller operational plan and the status of each agent’s assignment. I saw our names next to Agent 121, who I knew was the man who had driven us in. The status next to our names read captured. We were being treated like hostiles. From their position, I couldn’t blame them.
The agent walking with Jami hung a right and took her down a hallway and stopped at a holding room. I looked at the man escorting me, and he said, “Keep walking.” They were finally going to split us up.
I figured this was the standard FBI playbook. First, they’d split us up and prepare a list of questions. Then they’d ask each of us the same set of questions and compare our responses. The Bureau was already throwing multiple charges at Jami and me, and if they wanted to, they could go as far as they wanted to get information out of us. Based on the severity of the case, I knew they just might do that.
A few seconds later, we also hung a right and stopped in front of another holding room. I thought the corridor we were in must have curved around and led to the room that Jami had been taken to. The agent punched a code into the keypad and the door unlocked. We walked inside and he removed my handcuffs.
“Take a seat,” he said. “And make yourself comfortable. You’re going to be here for a while.”
Then the agent left and I was alone.
There was a large metal table in the center of the room and four chairs. A two-way mirror stretched the length of one of the walls. I paced the floor and went through the events from the past several hours. I thought about the flash drive and wondered what information might be on it. I wondered what the code 20 was all about, what event had taken place that would have warranted a citywide curfew to be declared.
My legs got tired after what felt like an eternity standing in the room, so I pulled back one of the metal chairs, took a seat at the table, and thought some more. What did the marking on the metal pipe mean, and was it even from Keller, or had it been there before? I thought about the kid who had discovered the senator’s location, and I wondered why he’d been in the warehouse with Keller.
Then my thoughts drifted back to my dad. Jim Keller was a friend to me, but had been like a brother to him. Despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to save the senator.
FIFTY-THREE
VICTOR PEREZ SPED down the unpaved backroads that led to the home deep in the woods, forty-five miles away from the warehouse. “Wake up! Damn you, wake up!” he yelled at the senator as they approached. Perez had planned to work from the deserted building in Chicago’s south side, but things changed quickly when his location was discovered by that kid. This was his plan B.
The kidnapper pulled into the driveway, jumped out of the van, and opened the cargo doors in the back. At the same time, a woman in her mid-thirties came out of the house. She had just arrived home from work and was still wearing her blue scrubs.
“What’s wrong? What do you need?” she asked.
“He’s unconscious again and isn’t breathing well,” Perez said, and the woman jogged to the senator to see for herself.
She pulled up the senator’s eyelids and saw that his eyes were rolling. She put an ear to his mouth while at the same time grabbed his arm and placed two fingers on his wrist.
“Pulse is weak. He’s wheezing; sounds like his airways are closing. This is bad. I’ll be right back. Don’t move him,” the woman said and disappeared back into the home.
James Keller had started to convulse on the drive to the house, but the kidnapper was unable to do anything about it. He couldn’t stop the van because he knew that with every minute that passed he came that much closer to being caught. He needed to get to the secluded home as quickly as possible.
Perez looked down the path that led to the driveway. Although he’d been to the home many times, he had never really paid attention to the surroundings. He was relieved to see that the closest neighbor was over a hundred yards away, and the house couldn’t even be seen because of the overgrowth of underbrush and the massive oak trees scattered in every direction.
Since he couldn’t see the neighbors, he knew they couldn’t see what was happening in the driveway. Perez felt safe here.
The woman ran back outside carrying an injector in one of her hands. For the past three months, she’d been taking home several types of medications from her nursing job at a local correctional facility, a job she took because of the lack of oversight. Some were antipsychotics intended to subdue their victims. These strong sedatives could safely put a person to sleep for hours. But she had also taken medication to increase blood pressure and help wake up a patient that might be unconscious, which she hoped would help wake up the senator now.
“Stand back,” she said as she held the epinephrine injector upright with the black tip pointed down. She stood over Keller’s body, which Perez had carefully pulled closer to the back of the van. With her other hand, the woman pulled off the gray cap and positioned her hand over Keller’s outer thigh.
She slowly tipped the injector so it was at a ninety-degree angle to his leg and quickly lowered her hand with enough force to pierce the skin and jab through the dress pants the senator wore.
The woman counted to ten and then removed the injector. She threw it on the ground and placed both hands over the area where she’d administered the shot and rubbed gently to encourage the adrenaline to move throughout his body. She counted to ten again and then took a few steps back.
“It didn’t work,” Perez said. “I need him conscious, or this will all be for nothing.”
“Just wait,” the woman said. A few seconds later, Senator Keller’s eyes opened and he started coughing violently. Keller gasped for air and sat up in the van.
“Take deep breath
s,” the woman said to him, and the senator started breathing more easily. “You need to learn to control your temper,” she said to Perez and walked back to the house.
“Move,” the kidnapper said as Keller got to his feet. Perez closed the van doors and grabbed the gun tucked inside his belt. “Get in the house,” he said, and Keller headed toward the front door.
FIFTY-FOUR
RIGHT AT NOON, I heard the sound of codes being entered into the keypad outside my holding room. An orderly walked in, followed by Agent Landry.
“I thought I told you this wasn’t your operation,” Landry said.
I started to get up.
“Stay seated, Agent Jordan,” Landry barked at me.
The orderly placed a meal on the table for me and left. Landry stayed standing and crossed his arms.
“I guess I didn’t make myself clear back at the United Center. I told you to stay out of this,” he said sternly.
“You know I couldn’t do that.”
“Because of your job or because he’s your friend?”
I glared back at the man. “Both,” I said. “I screwed up. It happened on my watch, like you said. I needed to make this right. If I would have arrived sooner, I could have rescued him.” I thought about John Burnett. Getting the location of the warehouse from him had taken longer than it should have. And that made all the difference.
“We’ll be keeping you under our jurisdiction until we get the senator back. Roger Shapiro is on board. As you know, you’ve been relieved of your duties at DDC, and he’s appointed Chris Reed as interim special agent in charge. I need to understand everything you’ve been involved in over the past sixteen hours, so I’ll have Agent Mallory meet with you shortly. We’ll hand you over to Shapiro when this is all over.”
“I want to know what’s happened since I was arrested at the warehouse.”
