Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  It registered on the visitors like a slap. As they recoiled with another shared look, Harvey noted movement behind them and off to the right. It was two men, one huge, the other average. He didn’t allow himself to look directly at them because they appeared to be armed, and through his peripheral vision, Harvey would swear that their aim was trained on the men who would kill him.

  “Two guys came and took the body away,” Harvey went on, thankful that the new additions to the cast gave him more inspiration. “One was really big, and the other one just normal.”

  “He’s lying,” Billy said. “You can see it in his face.”

  Sean regarded him for a moment, then nodded. “I think you’re right.” Then to Harvey, “You’d suck as a poker player.”

  Harvey couldn’t help himself. He shot a look directly at the new arrivals, a silent plea for help.

  It came instantly. “Drop your weapons!” one of them yelled. The rest of it unraveled in mere seconds, but Harvey was too busy dropping for cover to see a thing.

  Boxers drove the Batmobile while Jonathan rode shotgun. Boxers had christened the heavily armored and electronically enhanced Hummer H2 with its nickname due to the impressive technology it carried, and it stuck. Jonathan had finally shed his Leon Harris makeup and changed out of the suit that might have linked him to the breakout. He’d left them and their rental van at the farm with every confidence that everything would be properly disposed of, sanitized, or returned. During their ride back from the George Washington Memorial, he and Boxers had been generous in praising each other for the brilliance of their plan to return Jimmy Henry to jail.

  The U-Lockit franchise in Kinsale had been the next logical stop in their quest to pick up the trail. Given the early hour, he didn’t know what he might find, but experience taught that delaying the inevitable rarely paid dividends in the long run. Besides, it had already been twenty-eight hours since the assault on the school.

  “You know,” Boxers said as they closed within a mile of the place, “you’re gonna get your ass in a crack keeping the FBI out of this.”

  “Let them collect their own evidence,” Jonathan said. “They don’t appreciate our methods.”

  “Don’t you think this one’s a little close to home for pissing contests?”

  Jonathan shot the big guy a curious glance. Boxers didn’t often push back like this. “They couldn’t use what we gave them even if we gave it to them,” he explained. “Fruit from the poisonous tree and all that.” Jonathan considered it one of the great weaknesses of the United States’s system of jurisprudence that even in egregious cases like this one, the process used to obtain evidence was given equal weight to the evidence itself.

  “Besides,” he continued, “I’ll tip our hand to Doug when we get back to the Cove.” Doug Kramer was the chief of police in Fisherman’s Cove, and a childhood friend of Jonathan’s. Whether by accident or intrepid investigation, Doug had connected enough dots over the years to know the basic outlines of the illicit side of Jonathan’s firm, Security Solutions, and he’d made it very clear that badge notwithstanding, he saw no reason to interfere.

  A moment later, Boxers pointed ahead through the windshield. “What have we here?”

  An unremarkable black Chrysler sedan sat parked in front of the U-Lockit office, which was dark and appeared empty. The storage units themselves ran in parallel blocks behind it.

  Jonathan checked his watch. Five forty-five. “Go in quietly,” he said, instantly on alert. Never a believer in coincidences, he concluded that this car had to belong to a bad guy.

  Boxers coasted to a halt just inside the driveway and turned off the ignition. “How do you want to handle it?”

  Jonathan said, “Let’s keep it light. Weapons holstered but ready.” He opened the door and slid to the ground.

  Boxers joined him at the front bumper. “Who are you expecting them to be?”

  It was a good question. As Jonathan thought through Jimmy Henry’s story, it could be anyone from a bad guy returning to the scene of the crime to a cop investigating a lead. “I just want to be ready for the worst,” he said.

  As they approached the Chrysler, Jonathan noticed that the engine was still ticking as it cooled under the hood.

  “Sounds like they just got here,” Boxers said, speaking his boss’s thoughts.

  Jonathan cocked his head, listening. Something wasn’t right about this. “Who just parks in a storage lot at this hour? If you’re retrieving something from storage, you park in front of your unit. Whoever drove this car isn’t here for what’s in the units. They want something else.”

  “Like what?”

  That was the million-dollar question. Jonathan beckoned with his chin for Boxers to follow as he walked toward the woods at the edge of the lot. As the approached the grassy patch at the edge of the woods, he pointed to the ground. “Look here,” he said.

  Clearly, people had recently walked this way. They drew their weapons and started into the woods.

  Jonathan heard voices. On a still, humid morning like this, sounds traveled easily. He could clearly make out the hum of men’s voices in the distance, but a career of firearms, helicopter insertions, and explosives had made it impossible for his abused ears to decipher individual words.

  Three minutes later, they were on top of what looked to be a mugging in process. Two clean-cut guys in T-shirts had drawn down on a gangly Latino hippie who appeared to have established a campsite near the edge of the water. From the look of the place, Jonathan guessed that the guy had been living there for a long time. The body language of all three men telegraphed an urgency that told Jonathan he’d arrived in the proverbial nick of time.

  Moving with a choreographed unison that came from years of cooperation, Jonathan and Boxers spread out slightly to create a more difficult target, and they both brought their weapons to bear. As they approached to within twenty yards, Jonathan made brief eye contact with the bearded victim, and noted with interest how cool the guy remained as he continued to pivot in a wide circle away from the campsite. To Jonathan, that meant that there was something worth hiding in the camp.

  At this range, their words were clear. The hippie was talking a mile a minute-something about these guys being three hours late.

  Jonathan felt Boxers’ gaze on him and returned it with a nod. The time had come to intervene.

  “Drop your weapons!” he yelled.

  The hippie, who seemed to have been expecting the confrontation, reacted instantly, dropping to the ground to leave an unobstructed sight picture.

  The men in the T-shirts whirled, with guns at the ready and murder in their eyes. There was no time for negotiation.

  Jonathan and Boxers fired simultaneously, and the men died on their feet-triple-tapped with two shots to the heart and one to the forehead in the time that it took for the first spent shell casing to hit the ground.

  Even with the targets neutralized, neither man broke his aim. Jonathan yelled, “If I didn’t just shoot you, you’d better by God stand up and show me your hands.”

  Nobody moved. Boxers shrugged.

  “Last chance!” Jonathan yelled. “If I have to come and find you, you will not be happy.”

  As he spoke, he kept his aim trained on the spot where the hippie had disappeared. It surprised him when the man slowly rose above the grass thirty feet to the right. He and Boxers pivoted their aim in unison.

  The guy looked older than he had before. Scrawnier and dirtier, too. He rose straight up, as if on an elevator, his large hands extended more out than up, his fingers splayed wide. He looked scared to death.

  “Very well done,” Jonathan coached. “Very smart.”

  He sensed movement near the campsite at the exact instant when Boxers said, “Left.”

  Since Jonathan held the left flank, the target belonged to him. He pivoted as Boxers held fast.

  Jesus, it was a child. The look of terror in the boy’s face didn’t touch the feeling of horror in Jonathan’s stomach as he b
roke his aim and redirected the muzzle of the. 45 to the ground. The weapon was still at the ready if he needed it, but even an unheard-of accidental trigger pull couldn’t do any harm.

  “Don’t let that one move an inch closer,” Jonathan said, pointing to the hippie. He moved in closer to the boy, and within two steps, he recognized him. “Jeremy?” It seemed too good to be true.

  The boy’s mask of fear morphed into a mask of confusion. Then, finally, recognition. “Mr. Jonathan,” he said.

  Jonathan holstered his weapon, still cocked as always, and rushed to the boy. He stopped, though, when Jeremy recoiled. “Are you all right?” Jonathan asked. He shot a contemptuous glare at the hippie, whose hands remained high. Jonathan dared another couple of steps, stopping just a foot or two outside the kid’s personal space. “We’ve been worried sick about you,” he said. He resisted the urge to ask about the other missing child, Evan Guinn. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe he just wanted to savor this victory before finding out awful news.

  Still, Jeremy didn’t move. He just cocked his head a little, as if trying to fit together the pieces of too complex a puzzle.

  Jonathan had memorized the dossiers on the missing children, so he knew Jeremy Schuler to be thirteen years old-a seventh grader just three years away from having a driver’s license-but at this moment he could have been ten, or even eight. Six. Pick a number. As his features melted, he transformed from young man to little boy.

  He launched himself at Jonathan, wrapping his arms around his chest in a crushing bear hug, and he dissolved into deep racking sobs. Jonathan wasn’t ready for it. The rawness of the emotion made him self-conscious. He patted Jeremy’s back, and then he cupped the crown of his head and pulled him in closer.

  In Jonathan’s job, nothing good ever came from crossing the line that separated the heart from the head. His world was about life-and-death decisions made quickly, in the vacuum of professional detachment. That meant shunning hugs from relieved victims and constructing emotional walls to separate him from the people he helped.

  As Jeremy Schuler trembled and sobbed, his hot tears soaking into the fabric of his shirt, Jonathan felt his defenses crumbling. A few yards away, Boxers searched the hippie for weapons.

  This was a victory, Jonathan told himself. With one still missing, it was only one half of total victory, but it was a moment to be celebrated nonetheless. In the midst of a thousand unanswered questions, Jonathan Grave knew one fact beyond even the slimmest sliver of doubt: Whoever had hurt this child-whoever might still be hurting Evan Guinn-was going to pay an extraordinary price.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Brandy Giddings sat comfortably in the upholstered antique chair in the hallway, pretending not to notice the stares from the stern-faced Secret Service agents who stood in their assigned corners of the anteroom. She marveled at the way they could simultaneously project lethality and professional indifference. She wondered if The Look-easily recognizable by anyone with eyes-was specifically taught in the academy.

  Did they even have an academy? she wondered. Surely they learned their craft somewhere, but she’d never heard mention of such a place. FBI Academy, yes-everybody knew that was in Quantico, Virginia, the place where Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster’s character in The Silence of the Lambs) received her orders-but a Secret Service Academy? Never heard of one.

  Even a year and a half after her dream job had grown to become her oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-it job-a year and a half after American voters had voted an exciting newcomer into the White House-she still had to pinch herself from time to time.

  She’d been all over the world, meeting the prime minister of England and the Pope in Rome, the premier of China, and the president of Russia, but through it all, nothing brought the same sense of awe and raw power as sitting right here in the West Wing of the White House. The very lack of pretense-the low ceilings and time-worn moldings-only added to the majesty of the place.

  Brandy’s title was special assistant to the secretary of defense, but she knew what people thought. She listened to talk radio and knew that Denise Carpenter-“The Bitch of Washington, DC”-had christened her Defcon Bimbo. Those were just ugly words from the conservative queen of an ugly town. Harry Truman had said it best: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

  Brandy Giddings didn’t care what people thought. Her boss, Secretary Jacques Leger, would be the first secretary of defense to stress peace over war, embrace inclusion over exclusion. And Brandy was part of it all. It was just too much to believe.

  At twenty-eight, Brandy was blessed with the looks of someone ten years younger, and the body to go with them; but what would have been a blessing in Hollywood was a curse here in its East Coast sister city. Washington was the city of Birkenstocks and minimal makeup. “Look like a dyke or die,” as one of her fellow Georgetown grads had told her.

  To hell with them. Looking hot had worked very well for Brandy, first landing her a spot on then-Senator Leger’s staff, and then propelling her into the E-Ring of the Pentagon, where the office accommodations put those of the White House to shame. While nothing trumped the greatness of the Oval, her boss’s digs were known throughout the world as the most opulent in the federal government.

  Brandy’s was a job that led to Great Things. She commanded the attention of four-star generals and forty-year career bureaucrats, and it drove them all mad. As Secretary Leger’s right-hand lady for matters not directly related to national defense, she rarely waited more than ten minutes for her calls to be returned. With official cover from her boss, she traveled the world in tricked-out executive military jets that would make corporate titans blush.

  Talk-show blabbers and late-night hosts could say whatever they wanted. None of their words could undo the reality of where she was and where they were not. When the history books were written, Brandy Giddings’s fingerprints would be there, if only through the victories of the man she served.

  Note the lowercase S in “served.” There was no romance between Secretary Leger and her. Had he offered the opportunity it undoubtedly would have been different, especially during his senate years, but as it was, their mutual loyalty was built entirely of trust and hard work. As time progressed, she’d learned to accept that as best.

  Today, as she waited in the narrow hallway outside of the Oval for the cabinet meeting to adjourn, Brandy scrolled absently through the e-mails in her BlackBerry, developing her strategy for breaking the bad news to the secretary. Their efforts to control the outcome of one very important matter had taken a bad turn, and it fell to her to keep the boss in the loop without propelling him over the edge. The roots of this particular matter reached back to the earliest days of his career.

  When her electronic leash revealed that the news had not yet improved, she thrust it back into her purse and checked her watch again. Six-thirty. It hadn’t yet been eight hours since her previous seventeen-hour day had ended. For a job that delivered so many perks, the hours sucked.

  The president had always prided himself in being an early riser, but in the three months since the New York Times had played up that element in the profile they’d done on him, he’d become maniacal about it. Of course, when you have the ultimate home office and you’re an early riser by nature, why not call 6:00 a.m. meetings? It’s not as if anyone’s going to say no.

  Brandy sighed and recrossed her legs, this time daring to return the agent’s glance. If she didn’t want men to notice her body, she’d have long ago surrendered to her French fries jones. If she didn’t want them to drool on her boobs, she’d quit wearing push-up bras. It was becoming obvious that a recognizable love life would be the price paid for her patriotic zeal, so why not encourage a few stares from the Secret Service? There were far worse bed partners in this life than a hard-bodied man who lived for the opportunity to sacrifice his life for others.

  Besides, you know what they say: Big hands, big feet, big…gun.

  The door to the cabinet room opened, and her fantasy lover sna
pped back to attention. Brandy stood. As the lesser ranks of Washington royalty filed past-the secretaries of agriculture and interior departed the meeting first-Brandy might just as well have been invisible, and their studied indifference amused her. In the two-plus centuries of the republic, no one who held their positions had left so much as a dent on history. Ditto Transportation, Commerce, and, God help us, Health and Human Services. For them to have any self-respect at all, she figured, they felt compelled to pretend she wasn’t there. She almost felt sorry for them. How difficult it must be to be at the pinnacle of your career and know that you’ll be banished to obscurity.

  “Cheer up,” Secretary Leger said as he powered into the anteroom. “Don’t think of it as early; think of it as a running start on the day.”

  “I try, sir,” she said, forcing a smile. She hurried to catch up with the stride that never slowed.

  He gave her a sideward glance. “Did you just call me sir? Sounds foreboding.”

  As they approached the door that led to Executive Drive and the waiting limos, Brandy slipped into her proper place three feet behind the secretary, just in case any reporters had infiltrated this deep. A second rule of power in Washington was to never risk hogging the frame of a picture that was being shot of your boss.

  While all cabinet secretaries got a car and a driver as part of their package of perks, only the secretary of state and SecDef got their own security details. Granted, SecDef’s was a small one-a driver and a shotgun rider, plus a single follow car-but it was enough to add to the mystique of the position. The shotgun rider was the man in charge, a thirty-something Army major in civilian clothes, and as Secretary Leger approached the right rear door of the town car, the major opened it for him and then closed it as soon as his butt hit the seat. On the opposite side, Brandy was left to fend for herself. A few weeks ago, during a conversation that Brandy had mistakenly thought was flirtatious, the major-his name was Binder-had made it clear that his duty to protect the secretary in no way extended to her. In fact, he’d emphasized his point by explaining that staffers like her were considered by bodyguards to be de facto human shields whose presence made it more difficult for an assassin to take a clear shot.