by Jami Alden
“We’re right behind you.”
“Tell him to shoot them!” Jerry said. “Connors has her. You have no idea what he’s going to do to her!”
Derek’s response was bone-dry and matter-of-fact. “If Alex tries to take them out, they’ll catch on that they’re being followed. You think they’ll lead us to Kara then?”
Ethan pulled a pair of plastic cuffs from his pocket and used them to restrain Jerry while Derek did the same to the shooter. Ethan flipped his phone open and dialed Toni’s number.
“What the hell is going on?” she demanded, her voice high and harsh. “Did I hear gunshots?”
“I’ll explain everything. Get the car over here, now.” He hung up on her in midquestion, grabbed Jerry by the arm, and dragged him over to the approaching BMW.
Toni screeched to a halt and flung open the door. “Someone tell me what’s going on!”
Derek grabbed the shooter and wrestled him into the backseat. “You got a first aid kit?”
“In the trunk,” Ethan said and shoved Jerry through the rear passenger door. “Try not to bleed all over my seat.”
The guy gave him a weak “Fuck you.”
Derek slid in the back with their prisoners while Toni rode shotgun.
“Alex, what’s your position?” Ethan asked, slamming the car into reverse. The sound of tires squealing and the smell of burning rubber filled the air.
“I’m on them, heading west on Woodside Road, about to cross Alameda.”
“Let me know if he gets on 280. I’ll get ahead of him and intercept.”
He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Jerry, white as a sheet, pressing himself as far away as possible from the wounded guy, who winced and swore as Derek knotted a bandage around his forearm.
“Gotta be tight to slow the blood flow,” Derek said, giving the knot another yank with a grim smile.
“Where is he heading?” Ethan asked the guy. “Where does he have the girl?”
“He has Kara?” Toni said, eyes going wide as she whipped her head around.
“I don’t know about any girl,” the guy said. “I got a call this morning. Someone has a job for me, tells me where to show up. That’s all I know.”
Derek wrapped his hand around the guy’s wounded arm and squeezed. “You sure about that?”
“Fuck!” The man’s voice broke and he half sobbed, half groaned, “Yes! I swear! I don’t know nothing about a girl! I was gonna get ten grand for killing and dumping.”
Alex’s voice broke in through Ethan’s headset. “They did not get on the highway. We’re still heading west on Woodside Road.”
Woodside was part of Highway 84, running all the way from the East Bay across the Dumbarton Bridge, over the mountains, to the coast. Connors was heading up into the hills, where homes were tucked amid dense redwood forests, and narrow, twisty roads offered seclusion and privacy from curious neighbors.
“I bet Jerry knows,” Toni spat out. “I knew you had something to do with this, you fucking weasel.”
Toni’s body coiled as if she was going to launch herself into the backseat and pound Jerry into oblivion. As much as Ethan would have enjoyed watching that, now wasn’t the time. “Ease off, Toni.”
“I don’t know,” Jerry said, his voice high, panicked.
“It’s fine,” Ethan said. “We’re on him. We know exactly where he’s going.” He wished he could stop, dump Toni off somewhere safe and the two stooges with the police, but there wasn’t time. Jesus, this night was turning into a fucking circus act.
“We have to hurry,” Jerry said, as if Ethan weren’t already driving like a bat out of hell. “He’s says he’s going to sell her.”
Ethan was pretty sure he knew what that meant, wished he didn’t. “Sell her? To who? White slavers?”
“He says there’s a group of men, very wealthy men, who pay to…have…virgins.”
“What?” Toni said, the horror in her voice echoing Ethan’s.
“He knew all about Kara from all her stuff on the Internet,” Jerry said. “When I balked at handing over the prototype, he took her, said he knew people who would pay a lot of money to…” he stopped, unwilling to voice what they were all thinking.
Toni buried her face in her hands. “And knowing all that, you didn’t call the police?”
“I had time!” Jerry said. “He said if I delivered the prototype she would be okay!”
“And you think you can trust a guy who sells teenage girls to wealthy perverts?” Toni scoffed. “You knew you’d ruin your career. You put Kara in danger to cover your own ass.”
Jerry didn’t even try to defend himself.
“I heard Connors say something about three girls. Who are the other two?”
Jerry shook his head. “I don’t know, that’s the first time I’ve heard anything.”
“As long as we’re on the ride, Jerry, why don’t you tell us everything you do know.”
Ethan listened, his hands tightening on the steering wheel as Jerry recounted how William Connors had approached him nearly a year ago with a proposition. Ethan had figured out most of it, but his stomach tightened as Jerry filled in the gaps, describing what his cutting-edge biochip was capable of.
Toni shook her head. “You knew who had her, all this time.”
“I had it under control,” Jerry said, the streetlights flashing on his pale face as Ethan flew through a yellow light.
“Son of a bitch!” Both Ethan and Derek jumped as Alex’s voice crackled over the headset. Alex cursed again, and there was a squeal of a car skidding, the roar of metal twisting and glass smashing as a vehicle hit something with devastating impact.
Then silence.
“Alex? Alex!” Both he and Derek were shouting into their mouthpieces. “Are you okay? What’s the situation?”
A low moan, then, “I hit something big. I think it was a deer. Came around a sharp curve and the damn thing jumped right in front of the car. I skidded out and smashed into a tree.”
Of all the fucking luck. The woods in that area were thick with wildlife, everything from deer to jackrabbits to the occasional mountain lion. And now Kara’s rescue was thwarted by fucking Bambi. “Are you injured?”
“The airbag smashed the NVGs into my face, but other than that I’m okay. Car’s smashed to hell, though.”
Ethan slammed the heel of his hand into the steering wheel. Alex’s car was wrapped around a giant sequoia, and Connors was long gone.
CHAPTER 15
“W HAT ARE WE going to do?” Jerry asked, his panicky voice grating across Toni’s nerves like a fork on a plate. She was strung tight, nerves frayed, as she sat in the passenger seat of Ethan’s car. The sound of gunshots had made her blood run cold, fear spiking as she imagined Ethan lying in a pool of blood on the asphalt.
She’d almost cried in relief when she heard his voice, strong and firm and sure. The brief rundown of events was mind-boggling. Yeah, she’d been sure Jerry was up to something, but she never imagined this.
Now, once again, she had to fight from jumping into the backseat and pounding his face in for what he’d done to Kara. His very presence revolted her. Part of it was the smell. In other circumstances, she would have been delighted that Jerry had been so scared he’d wet himself, that fear coated him with acrid sweat. But in the close confines of the car, the stench of sweat and piss made her gag.
As if the smell weren’t enough, the thought of what might happen to Kara—what might already be happening—sent bile bubbling into the back of her throat. Name her a sexual fetish and Toni could find an online community with hundreds of devoted members. That there were men out there willing to pay to sleep with unwilling virgins didn’t surprise her.
She was horrified nonetheless. At what the victims went through. At what happened to them afterward. And what if they discovered Kara wasn’t as innocent as they thought? What then?
She pushed the what-ifs aside. She had to focus on gathering every clue, every scrap of information they c
ould get if they wanted to find her in time.
Ethan ignored Jerry’s frantic babbling as he instructed Alex to sit tight and call 911. “Don’t tell them what you were doing up there,” he said. “I don’t want to bring the cops into this just yet.”
“No cops. Good idea. I’ll pay you,” Jerry babbled. “If you get us out of this you can name your price.”
Toni was appalled. Ethan was silent, and for a long, sickening moment Toni thought he was actually entertaining the proposition.
“You covered up your own daughter’s kidnapping, and you tried to have Toni killed,” Ethan said finally, his voice so menacing even Toni got chills.
“I didn’t,” Jerry protested. “It was Connors. I told him she was snooping around, but he’s the one—”
“Don’t try to logic your way out of this, Jerry. Whether or not you made the call, you instigated it. And if that wasn’t enough, my brothers and I have spent a combined twenty-eight years in the military.” Ethan stopped at a red light and turned to face Jerry. “Twenty-eight years defending our country against people who want to destroy us. People like that slimebag you sold your technology to. You really think there’s enough money in the world that would get me to help someone like you get away with it?”
Toni wanted to kiss him and sing The Star-Spangled Banner.
Jerry’s swallow was audible.
“Get one thing straight. We’re keeping the police out of this for now because I don’t want to waste time answering questions. But when Kara’s back, safe and sound, I’ll see to it that you spend fifty years to life locked up with a big burly-top named Bubba.”
“Why are you turning?” Jerry asked when Ethan veered off Woodside and started heading south. “They were going this way.”
“We need to get back to the office to regroup. Toni, when we get there I want you to find everything you can dig up on William Connors. Did you run his plates yet?”
She nodded. She’d been able to run them on her BlackBerry while she waited in the car for what had seemed like decades. “The car is registered to a Whitepoint Corporation, and the address is a P.O. box. Once I’m at the office, I can find out if it has a nav system or anything else to track its location.”
They pulled up to the Gemini offices. The lights were on and the place was humming even at three in the morning. Toni took a moment to marvel at the contrast between her cramped, makeshift office and Gemini’s spacious, modern, beautifully decorated headquarters. Customers would walk in here and know they were dealing with the best of the best.
Ethan’s older brother Danny greeted them. The man managed to look intimidating even though he was wearing baggy gym shorts and flip-flops, his left arm still secured by a sling. Even with a broken nose and two black eyes, he was as good-looking as his brothers. But there was something almost menacing about the oldest Taggart. First there was his size. Ethan and Derek were big guys, but Danny had at least two inches of height and twenty pounds of muscle on both of them. And then there were his eyes, steel gray, cold as a glacial river.
Toni swallowed hard and made a mental note to steer clear of scary Danny.
Danny took off with Connors’s bodyguard while Ethan pulled Jerry into an empty conference room. Toni and Derek followed. She sat down at the conference table and opened her laptop. “Jerry, how did you communicate with Connors? If you have an e-mail address or a cell phone number, I might be able to trace his location.”
Jerry shook his head. “We used those pay-as-you-go phones.”
Toni swore. Cell phone calls were getting so easy to track, that the disposable cell phone had become the modern criminal’s favorite mode of communication.
“And I deleted all the e-mails, all communication.”
Toni shook her head impatiently as she logged in to the secure server where she’d backed up all of Jerry’s files. “I was able to recover everything off your computer, every last fragment.” People thought they could wipe out their digital tracks the way they wiped away fingerprints. “Just tell me where to look.”
“There’s nothing on my computer,” Jerry said. “I’ve been using Kara’s computer so nothing could be traced back to GeneCor.”
“Her computer’s at your house?” Ethan said, already heading for the door.
“It’s at my office,” Jerry said. “Middle desk drawer. You’ll need my key card.” He grunted as Ethan shoved him forward and dug around in Jerry’s back pocket. Card in hand, he headed for the door.
“You’re going alone?” Toni said. “Shouldn’t Derek or someone go with you, since people were, you know, shooting at you before?”
The look Ethan gave her was pleased, if a little puzzled at her concern. “I’ll be fine, babe. Back in a flash.”
She bent over the keyboard and risked a glance at Derek to see if he’d noticed the small endearment. “Ethan can take care of himself,” Derek said without looking up from his handheld.
Jerry’s bound hands left damp marks on the surface of the mahogany table. His leg bounced hard enough to launch him into the stratosphere. “You’re just going to sit there?” He looked over at Derek’s screen. “What, you’re doing e-mail? ‘Hey, dude, how’s it going?’ My fucking daughter is missing and you’re e-mailing your friends?”
Derek set down his BlackBerry and leveled Jerry with a look so harsh she expected Jerry to turn to stone. “I’m e-mailing pictures and descriptions of your buddies Connors and Smith to a good friend of mine at the FBI. With any luck, they’ll stop him in Customs before he can make off with the means to build a supervirus.”
“Oh,” Jerry said, chastened. He licked his lips. “It won’t work, you know.”
Toni raised her eyebrow inquisitively.
“I modified the chips,” Jerry said, almost beseechingly. “The seals on some of the valves aren’t airtight. Without the proper level of humidity, they can’t run their samples. The chips are useless.”
“So no supervirus?” Toni said.
Jerry shook his head, looking smug at his ability to cover his ass.
Toni’s lips curled into a snarl. “Nice of you to grow a conscience at the eleventh hour, but that doesn’t help us pinpoint Kara’s location.”
She got everything ready, then went to the kitchen and made herself a double latte in the espresso machine in the break room. Ethan still wasn’t back. “Show me the deposits from Connors,” she said as she called up Jerry’s offshore account statements, unwilling just to sit and do nothing while she waited for Ethan to show up.
There were deposits from three different accounts, and Toni and Derek doubled up to try to track the source.
Toni had managed to link one account to a corporation headquartered in Düsseldorf when Ethan arrived with Kara’s computer.
She pounced on it like a lion on a gazelle and immediately set to work, hooking it up to her own computer so she could start the data-recovery process. Ethan came over and removed her watch from her wrist. Toni barely spared him a glance. “Did you use a shredder program?” she asked Jerry.
Jerry nodded and gave her the name.
Most shredder programs worked by overwriting data with a pattern of zeros, though more sophisticated utilities used specific overwrite patterns. Fortunately, the program Kramer had used was relatively easy for Toni to work around.
Toni started the data-and media-recovery programs, limiting her search to files that had been deleted in the last thirty days to make the process go faster. She looked over at Ethan, her attention snagging when she saw he’d taken the back off her watch and was poking around inside. “What are you doing?” Her watch was a cheap digital model from Target, but hey, it worked, and she didn’t want to buy another one.
“Cool your jets,” he said, poised over the watch with a pair of tweezers. “I’m planting a tracking device in here. Don’t worry. Your watch will work fine.”
“Why do I need a tracking device?”
The look Ethan gave her was hard, exasperated. He held up his own wrist and nodded to Derek
. “We all wear them, and with everything that’s happening, I’ll feel better knowing exactly where you are, okay?”
Toni didn’t protest as he buckled the watch back on her wrist, inexplicably warmed by the idea that Ethan wanted to keep tabs on her. “I’m not the one we need to worry about,” she reminded him as she turned her attention back to her excavation of Kara’s computer.
It seemed to take forever for the program to churn through the gigabytes of data, but finally the photo-recovery program got a hit. Toni clicked to restore the image, then opened it up to view.
Jerry made a small, choked sound as he looked at the screen.
“Connors sent you this photo?” she said, nausea roiling her stomach as she stared at a mockery of a sexy boudoir photo. But that was no lingerie-clad seductress giving the camera a come-hither look.
In the photo, Kara Kramer was dressed in a white, ruffled nightshirt, the hem pushed high enough to allow a glimpse of white cotton panties. Her blond hair spilled across the pillow and her eyes were wide with fear. Toni zoomed in on her face and saw a faint bruise at the corner of Kara’s mouth.
Toni saw the terror in Kara’s eyes and felt her throat tighten, her eyes sting. God, she was so scared. Had to still be so scared.
Ethan’s hand rested on her shoulder, calming, bracing her. Toni pushed Kara’s fear aside, disassociated herself, reminding herself it could have been so much worse.
At least, she thought morbidly, if they wanted her to stay a virgin, it’s doubtful she’d been raped.
“Can you figure out who took it?” Ethan asked as she ran it through her EXIF viewer.
Toni scanned the data, unable to suppress the triumphant smile pulling at her lips. “I can do better than that. I can tell you exactly where it was taken.”
Ethan, Jerry, and Derek all leaned in to see what she was talking about. “I’d love to say it’s my brilliance, but it looks like Connors got a fancy new camera and didn’t take into account all the special features.”
A smile spread across Derek’s face as understanding dawned.
