The Doll

by Taylor Stevens

  But nothing. He closed his eyes and opened them to Sam Walker’s feet.

  From where she stood, he could see the bottom of the vests, one draped over each shoulder, and gripped in her right hand a backpack that held the war room’s ready stash of tracking and surveillance equipment.

  The clock on his phone said fifteen minutes since he’d blinked.

  “You awake?” Walker whispered.

  Just enough of a hiss to ensure that even if he hadn’t been, he would be now.

  “Yeah,” he said. “What’d you get?”

  “Jack stays, I go.”

  Bradford scooted out from under the desk. “That so?” He turned his back to roll up the bed. “How’d you manage that?”

  Walker sighed. “Two on, two off, and we break after dawn.”

  Bradford nodded. “Does he have a shopping list?”

  “He’s good with whatever we get.”

  He handed her the Explorer keys. “You drive,” he said. “I’ll sleep.”

  THE ARMORY WAS a war-room legend, on par with Bigfoot or the whispered rumors of Munroe’s ability to absorb languages. Only a handful knew of its confirmed existence, and of those only Bradford and Jahan knew where it was or how to get inside. The armory was just in case; it was hell-in-a-hand-basket, old habits die hard: a collection that had steadily grown over the years in anticipation of a scenario in which he with the biggest guns wins.

  Walker pulled the Explorer out of Capstone’s garage space, and Bradford recited the address. She glanced at him with that look of hers but said nothing until they were off the 80, east of Dallas, a full thirty minutes from where they’d started. She pulled off the access road to stop in front of a twenty-four-hour storage complex and nudged Bradford awake.

  The cluster of cinder-block buildings sat back off the feeder road in an area of used-car lots and bodywork and pawn shops—an area just derelict enough that the razor-wire fencing, powerful lights, and security cameras would have been necessary if they hadn’t already come as part of the package.

  Bradford leaned over Walker, half planting himself in her lap to enter the gate code. She held her breath. It seemed unfair that after days of burning the midnight oil, she still smelled human and lightly floral.

  The fenced gate rolled open, and Bradford directed Walker through the maze of alleys between buildings to the rear of the complex and the front of a cinder-block ten-by-twenty leased in a fake name and registered to a fake business.

  Bradford stepped out, keyed the padlock open, and lifted the reinforced door up on its rollers to the midpoint, then went in under and moved through the darkness to the left wall. By touch he deactivated the alarm on a pad without a backlight.

  If the door had passed the three-quarter mark, if he’d taken longer than forty seconds to get to the numerical pad, the storage unit would have filled with smoke and CS gas, and the war room, so many miles away, would have been notified that the cache had been compromised and to stay the hell away.

  Bradford raised the door the remaining distance, and Walker backed the Explorer as close to the opening as the limited width of the alley allowed.

  The unit housed seven fireproof gun safes, chained together and lag-bolted to the concrete. Bradford unlocked two. The fragrance of gun oil and metal overpowered the musk of dust from the storage space. He paused to scan the contents, and Walker, guiding the flashlight for his benefit, let out a low whistle.

  “Armageddon, much?” she said.

  “Grab that duffel bag to your right, will you?”

  She swung the beam just long enough to snag the canvas and toss it in his direction. Paused and then also toed an empty plastic foot locker toward him. In the silence, it groaned, loud against the concrete. Bradford stared at her. Shook his head and returned to a safe. Pulled the door wider so that she had a clear view of the inventory.

  “Pick your flavor,” he said.

  Walker pointed with the light. “One for me, one for Jack.”

  Bradford unracked an MP5, ran the bolt, and handed the weapon to her. Did the same for the two he placed in the locker. “And that sniper,” she said.

  He followed the light to the lone M2010, his newest addition to the cache, a tool that in the right hands had an effective range of 1,200 meters: agent of death from three-quarters of a mile away.

  Walker didn’t have traditional military training, hadn’t gone through a conventional war that might look good on a private contractor’s brag sheet, or give him cause to hand over such a piece. Instead she’d had her overly protective father who’d lived as a shooter for nearly two decades and treated her as if she was his only son. Walker knew more about the art of sniping than some men who’d been hunting their entire lives, and although Bradford wouldn’t risk putting her up against elite military, the jobs he ran typically didn’t require that level of skill.

  She slid from the tailgate to take the rifle from him. Handled the piece with the same tenderness and admiration a mother would show a newborn.

  Bradford collected the scope and bipod and passed them to her, then shut that safe.

  Walker said, “What about plastics?”

  She wanted controlled explosion. Bradford reopened the safe, grabbed several C4 bricks and the detonators. He raised them to her.

  “Good enough,” she said.

  He added the explosives to the duffel bag, then locked the safes. She helped him lift the supplies into the Explorer.

  Against everything his heart wanted, he would use what was left of the morning’s darkness to track Logan—not Michael, Logan. Because Logan was here and Munroe was not, and if they were successful in rescuing Logan before the Doll Maker’s men finished him, it just might also be enough to save her.

  ZAGREB, CROATIA

  Valon Lumani stood in front of the wall of dolls, hands behind his back and his focus entirely on Uncle, who sat studying papers. In the thirty minutes since he’d been summoned, not once had Uncle acknowledged his presence.

  He would stand here for a touch of acceptance, something to show that he had value in the eyes of the only father he could remember. And he would stay silent, because to speak and be ignored, as if he was a ghost passing unseen and unheard among the living, would only reconfirm his worthlessness, and in that lay infinitely more pain.

  So Lumani stood and waited, while the events of last night became his private movie and the whispers among the men the sound track, words that filtered back to him as resentfulness, as accusations of favoritism, because for failure Uncle punished him with silence instead of taking flesh.

  The men would never understand.

  For physical pain there were painkillers to last until the torment faded, but for emotional pain there was only the perpetual numbing of drugs and alcohol: a weakness that served to emphasize his defects and bare the humiliation in his lack of perfection. Physical pain would be preferable—far easier to block out and endure.

  Time passed, Uncle shuffled more papers, while the actions that had forced Lumani to his knees rewound and played again. Even after all his training, she had used him like a puppet to make a point to Uncle, had moved with speed so stunning he’d had no time to brace for it, utilized surprise to lead to the hidden weapon that if he’d followed the warnings, he wouldn’t have carried.

  In front of Uncle’s eyes, he had been humiliated, and he had failed. The successful completion of his latest mission, the orchestration of perfection in Texas, all the history of success was now so far away—nothingness, erased like marks in sand on the beach. The only thing that mattered was the moment, and the moment for him was failure.

  Uncle paused from his papers to pet the silky hair of a nearby doll, his action distracted and peaceful in the same contented way an old woman might stroke a cat. This had always been the way of the old man: love and attention lavished upon nonliving things while breathing flesh and blood held no space in his heart.

  The door reverberated with a knock, and Lumani’s heart answered with its own beat. He had
been humbled last night by a woman, outsmarted in a way that none of Uncle’s men had ever managed. He wanted what she had, even if she was only a woman, and that realization brought a touch of fear, and more, the rush of feeling alive.

  The door opened.

  Lumani didn’t turn.

  The Michael woman stepped inside and Uncle glanced up from his papers, his expression transforming from indifference to a welcoming smile.

  “My friend,” he said, and motioned for her to sit.

  Hatred and jealousy crested over Lumani’s rush. She, through no good thing, she, this woman, this disposable commodity that would be used and destroyed, had earned another smile that should have been given to him.

  The woman sat, then slow and deliberate turned to look in his direction. Without words she spoke to him, and without words said that she knew his thoughts, his prison. He focused on the desk to ignore her, though his heartbeat quickened again. If he could have, he would have gone to her now and forced her through her pain to allow him her secrets.

  Instead, frustration and resentment seeped through his pores.

  The movements of Uncle and the Michael woman seemed to set out in slow motion. Uncle reached into a drawer for the car keys and GPS system, the map, the passports and car papers: as transport, she was given full responsibility for the package, would be alone in the car with it. More conversation until Uncle’s voice cracked through the mirror of oblivion and Lumani raised his eyes to find both Uncle and the woman staring at him.

  His face flushed. He hadn’t heard the words, but he knew their intent, the purpose for which he’d been summoned, and so he straightened, pulled the phone off his belt, and approached the woman. Offered her the phone, careful this time to keep a safe distance.

  He would have liked to have read from her body posture that no strike was imminent, but he hadn’t anticipated the attack in her last night and did not trust himself to properly gauge her now. She took the phone and stared at him again, as if attempting to read him the way he had tried to read her.

  Lumani, offering nothing, stepped back; she glanced at the phone and tapped the screen to play. She wanted proof of life and they were happy to make sure the evidence was plenty, but no matter what Uncle had promised, live streaming wasn’t going to happen. There was too much risk that Logan might, in some coded language, give away information that would aid her in circumventing well-laid plans, even from half a world away.

  Lumani studied the woman for reaction, and as he had done, she offered nothing. Unreadable. She raised her eyes to his when the clip ended and handed back the phone. Uncle pushed the supplies in her direction and she considered them a moment before speaking. “I want duct tape and a blanket,” she said, and when Uncle protested because none was at hand, she replied in his own words, “No drugs, no bruises.”

  She would get what she wanted because Lumani would be tasked with making sure of it, though nothing in that regard was said here in this room. The client was impatient and demanding. If they couldn’t deliver on his schedule, he would rescind his order, or worse, up the stakes and create more hoops for them to jump through, else the doll would have to be terminated. Uncle risked losing his investment, so therefore Lumani would provide and they would leave today, even if it meant this afternoon, which would turn this delivery into a minimum two-day event.

  Uncle spoke again, words of control, words of deterrence, to keep this woman from straying from the plan; every action had consequence, each delay a price. He offered her another smile, a smile that made Lumani’s insides burn. The Michael woman stood and Uncle handed her a cell phone. “This phone is your life,” he said. “Don’t lose it. Keep it on always.”

  The phone was the line of communication through which they were tethered, the means through which she would receive instructions for each leg of the journey. It was also bugged for sound and tagged for location so that they could electronically see and hear her always. Should she choose to risk damage to Logan by pulling the battery, the car held similar equipment.

  But these things Uncle never mentioned.

  Lumani, with his rifles, with his training, would be the one to ensure that she didn’t deviate from the plan, the one to report the moves upon which Logan’s life depended.

  IRVING, TEXAS

  Veers Transport was first on Bradford’s hit list for finding Logan because it had everything he looked for: Trucks. Office. Warehouse. Seclusion. Red flags.

  On the surface, the company was legitimate and profitable, and if not for the information found in the Doll Maker files, there would have been nothing about the business to have drawn the war room’s attention. Even Katherine Breeden’s name was no longer connected to the company, although it had once been. Only by following Breeden’s trail, as the dead man had, and working backward, could the connection have been made.

  Veers Transport owned a fleet of fifteen trucks, most of them class-six commercial vehicles with a couple of eighteen-wheelers thrown in for good measure. State filings were up-to-date; there was no pending litigation; the company properly paid income, sales, and unemployment taxes; it provided health-care benefits to full-time employees, of which it had eighteen; and none of the directors or officers of the closely held corporation were connected to the names on the Doll Maker’s roster.

  It had taken digging into the personal lives and histories of the primaries to sniff out the hole in the facade, because there was just no explaining how those who owned the company didn’t also own or rent property, own or drive vehicles, or how as recently as last month one of the men had listed a homeless shelter as his permanent address.

  Bradford drove by for a visual first pass.

  They were off Loop 12 in a commercial area dotted with importers and wholesalers spread among parking lots and wide single-story office complexes. The depot was directly off the road, surrounded by a chain-link fence, with a separate prefabricated building near the front and a two-bay warehouse toward the rear. There were six trucks in the lot, and if the entire fleet ever came home to roost at the same time, it would be a tight squeeze.

  To the casual observer, security was lax if not nonexistent, but to well-trained eyes, the cameras and motion detectors were easy to spot. Walker said, “You’d think in an area like this they’d flaunt the security.”

  “Maybe the low-key approach is for the benefit of law enforcement.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, and Bradford continued down the strip, far past the depot, to a smaller street and from there to the first right, which was an alley along the other side of the ten-foot wall that separated the residential area from the commercial complexes.

  Here, streetlights dotted the alley and backyards stretched from clapboard siding to chain-link fence, and faded and cracked plastic toys littered patchy lawns, occasionally joined or replaced by a car up on blocks.

  Satellite images had pointed to this route as the least intrusive form of access to the transport company, and Bradford kept the vehicle creeping along the narrow pitted road until the roof of the warehouse settled into position ahead. He stopped in what shadow existed and allowed the length of an office complex to separate the Explorer from their target. Walker snapped a magazine into an MP5, and they stepped into the night.

  ZAGREB, CROATIA

  Flat on her back, arms to her sides, Neeva stared at the ceiling. The metal door was open and had been ever since she’d woken: open and wide like a tormenting bully who offered something just to take a swing if you accepted. Chained to the wall, ankle trapped inside the rubber-coated metal ring, the tease of escape was far worse than being locked away in darkness. She yanked the chain in frustration, felt the solid tug, and deflated. She’d no energy left to scream and fight.

  The guard who usually sat outside her door was gone and the language recordings had stopped. She didn’t know if this was bad or good, because in this place change meant something worse was coming.

  She’d been bathed or showered since the water attack, because she was clean an
d the track suit smelled freshly laundered, and her hair was really weird. Shirley Temple weird.

  A shadow filled the doorway. Neeva jerked upright and backed up against the wall. There hadn’t been any footsteps to announce the person, not even in the silence. She fingered the chain, which had enough slack in it to use as a weapon if the shadow got close enough.

  The person ducked to enter and then moved out of the doorway so the light wasn’t directly behind, and Neeva could see the face—definitely the mystery person from yesterday, although the hair was different and the person now wasn’t so much an it as a he.

  “May I come in?” the person said, and Neeva stared, blinking, not because of the polite nature of the request but because this was the first real-life English she’d heard in so long she’d lost track, and it was real American English, not all accented and stilted as if one of these animals had learned it in school.

  “You’re already in,” Neeva said, and he smiled, kind of sad.

  “Michael,” he said, and stuck out a hand.

  Neeva didn’t move and after a while the hand withdrew.

  “You speak English,” Neeva said finally.

  “Apparently, so do you,” the Michael person said. “Very colorfully.”

  Neeva snorted, and Michael stepped closer. About halfway into the cell, he sat on the floor with his back to the wall and tipped his head toward the ceiling. Neeva waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Didn’t even look at her, which was more out of character for this place than anything else so far.

  “What do you want?” Neeva asked.

  His face shifted toward her. “To talk with you, if you don’t mind.”

  Neeva let out a bark of laughter. Chained to the wall, she wasn’t exactly going anywhere, and until now what she did or didn’t want had meant nothing. “Sure, talk,” she said. “But don’t you need to drop your pants and whack off first? That seems to be the order of things—that is, if you skip talking altogether.”