Christmas Kidnapping

by Cindi Myers

  Andrea joined them, out of breath from her race down the tunnel with Ian. “What is it?” she asked. “What did you find?”

  “Explosives,” Brian said. “Lots of them.”

  Jack motioned to the trunk. “Plastic explosives. Probably stolen. I think it’s the same stuff used in bombs set off at professional bicycle races around the country this past year. We caught a guy we think is connected to this group trying to sabotage the Colorado Pro Cycling Challenge in Denver in August.”

  “I remember hearing about that.” Andrea shifted Ian to her hip and stared at the open trunk. “What’s it doing here?”

  “Good question.” Jack closed the trunk. “It’s not the sort of thing they use in mining.”

  “This place doesn’t look like anyone has mined it in a hundred years.” Brian picked up one of the chunks of rock piled beside the trunk. “What do you think these are? Geodes or something?” He examined the fist-sized specimen.

  “Ore samples, maybe?” Jack shook his head. “They were probably here before the trunk was even brought in.”

  Andrea set Ian down and he immediately headed for the rocks and began picking them up. She glanced at the explosives. “I’m guessing that’s enough to do a lot of damage,” she said.

  “That trunk is probably enough to level this mountain,” he said. “At least, it would make a good-sized crater.”

  “Do you think Anderson and his bunch hid the trunk here?” she asked.

  “We’ll try to get fingerprints and DNA evidence off the trunk to be sure,” Jack said. “But that would be my guess.”

  “I’m glad I’m not the one who had to haul that heavy trunk all the way up here,” Brian said.

  “They probably thought it was worth the effort because no one would ever find it up here,” Jack said. “Before you found the place, probably no one had been here for decades.”

  “So this will help you connect Andy and the others to your Denver terrorists?” Brian asked.

  “Yes. And it might even lead us to their ringleader—the man we’ve been trying to stop for the past year,” Jack said. “He looks to be the money and the brains behind the operation.”

  “Somebody left their backpack,” Ian said.

  Jack whirled around and found the boy tugging at a black-and-orange backpack that had been covered by the pile of rocks. He knelt beside the boy and joined him in pulling the pack free. “Let’s see what you’ve got there,” he said.

  “Maybe it will have a name or something,” Brian said. “But I guess that would be too easy, huh?”

  Jack hooked the end of his pocketknife into the ring attached to the zipper pull of the pack’s main compartment and eased it open. He knelt and carefully upended the contents on the floor.

  “No weapons in this one,” Andrea observed.

  “Candy!” Ian reached for the chocolate bar on top of the pile.

  Andrea grabbed his hand and pulled him back. “You can’t eat the evidence, dear,” she said.

  Jack slipped the candy back into the pack and fished out a man’s wallet with the tips of his fingers. He flipped it open and stared at the driver’s license, a cold chill sweeping over him.

  “Mark Renfro.” Andrea read the name over his shoulder. “He doesn’t look like one of the men we saw at the camp.”

  “He’s not.” Jack closed the billfold and returned it to the pack, then stuffed everything else back inside.

  “Who is he?” Brian asked.

  “He’s the brother of one of the agents in my unit. He disappeared on a hiking trip in Colorado over a year ago.”

  “Another kidnapping victim?” Andrea asked.

  “Either that or a murder victim.” He raised his eyes to meet hers. “We have to find these people and stop them.”

  “Yeah,” Brian said. “As long as they don’t find us first.”

  * * *

  ANDREA SHIVERED AT Brian’s reminder that they were far from out of danger yet. “What else is in the pack?” she asked. She didn’t know what she was hoping for—something that could help them and get them out of this mess safely.

  “Just clothing, some freeze-dried food and a first-aid kit,” Jack said. “The kinds of things you would expect someone to take on a day hike in the mountains, which is what Mark was doing when he disappeared.”

  “Why would these guys want to kidnap him?” Brian asked. “Because they wanted to get back at his brother, the FBI agent?”

  “I don’t think so.” Jack finished zipping up the pack and stood. “Like your dad, Mark Renfro is a nuclear physicist. The terrorists may want him to work for them.”

  Andrea wasn’t willing to accept the conclusion her mind had leaped to. “Jack, you don’t think these people are trying to build a nuclear bomb, do you?”

  “I don’t know what to think.” He raked his hand through his hair. Like the rest of them, he was gray faced and weary, but anger sparked his words. “Judging by what they’ve done so far—the people they’ve killed and the lives they’ve disrupted—they’ll stop at nothing to reach their twisted goals.” He handed the pack to Brian. “This is important evidence,” he said. “Can I trust you to keep it safe until I can turn it over to my team?”

  Brian nodded and solemnly accepted the pack. “How are we going to get to your team from here?” he asked.

  Brian took out his phone and studied the screen. “I’m not getting a signal in this tunnel. I may have to go outside. But I’ll call my team leader and give him my coordinates. He can contact the people who can get us out of here and close in on this area and the camp while the others are still here.”

  “I don’t like knowing those four are still out there looking for us,” Andrea said.

  “All we have to do is stay hidden until help arrives,” Jack said. “Come on. Let’s get back to the front entrance and I’ll make the call.”

  He ushered them to the mine’s entrance. “I’m bored,” Ian announced.

  “So am I.” Brian sat cross-legged on the floor a few feet away from Andrea and Ian and began gathering pebbles. He used one of the pebbles to draw a circle in the dirt of the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Ian asked.

  “I’m going to have a battle with these rocks.” He completed his circle, then put more rocks in the center of the circle. “See, I use this rock—” he chose a large roundish pebble “—to shoot the other rocks out of the circle.” He demonstrated by flicking his thumb and forefinger against the pebble, sending it crashing into another rock, which shot out of the circle.

  Ian inched closer. “Can I play?”

  “Sure. It’s better with two people anyway.” He looked through the pile of pebbles and chose one for Ian to use as a shooter.

  When Jack stepped out of the mine, Brian was showing Ian how to flick his thumb and forefinger in order to send his pebble crashing into others in the circle.

  As he had hoped, his phone signal outside the cave was stronger. He called Ted Blessing’s number and listened to it ring.

  And ring. And ring. After five rings a mechanical voice informed him that he should leave a message. “This is Jack. We’re in an abandoned mine about four miles east of the camp. Anderson and his group returned in a helicopter with reinforcements and—”

  A long beep sounded, and then the phone went silent. Jack stared at the screen and pressed the button on the side of the phone to power it up again, but nothing happened. He swore under his breath and stared down at the woods below. In another hour or so the sun would set. If they were lucky, darkness would shut down the terrorists’ search for them until the morning, but the prospect of a cold night without food or water wasn’t one he looked forward to. He needed to find a way to get Andrea and Ian and Brian to safety, along with the evidence he had gathered. The sooner the team zeroed in on the camp and this mine, t
he sooner they could bring Duane Braeswood and his group to justice.

  Andrea looked up when Jack stepped back into the mine. She had switched on his flashlight and arranged it in the center of the mine entrance, propped up with rocks, like a little candle sending its feeble glow on their gathered faces. “Did you talk to your boss?” she asked. “Is he sending someone to get us?”

  “He didn’t answer my call,” Jack said. “I left a message with our location. Then the phone died.” He looked away, not wanting to see the disappointment in her eyes. He should have charged the phone first thing this morning, when he saw the battery was low. His carelessness had put all their lives in jeopardy.

  “Jack, come sit beside me.”

  Her voice was gentle, with no hint of judgment or reprimand. She patted the blanket beside her and he eased down next to her, trying to ignore the throbbing in his leg.

  “This isn’t your fault, you know,” she said, with the same matter-of-fact tone he imagined she used when she talked to her patients.

  “How did you know what I was thinking?”

  Her smile—the fact that she could smile at all, considering the circumstances, and that she would smile at him—knocked him a little unsteady, as if the ground had shifted beneath his feet. “None of us would probably be alive right now without your help,” she said.

  “I’m betting you’d be alive,” he said. “You’re pretty resourceful and fearless.”

  “Not fearless. But it helps that I’m not just fighting for myself. Alone, I might give up, but I’ll do anything to protect my son.”

  He followed her gaze to Ian, who was bent over the dirt circle, tongue protruding slightly as he concentrated on aiming his makeshift marble. “How is he doing?” Jack asked.

  “He still has a fever, but he’s not getting worse. We’ll see what happens after nightfall.”

  Jack leaned his head back against the rough rock wall. “So you realize we’ll probably have to spend the night here.”

  “Better to stay put than go stumbling through the woods at night.” She nudged him. “You aren’t really thinking you have to keep that chocolate bar as evidence, are you? I’ll give you the wrapper, but that chocolate is going to be eaten if we stay here, along with that granola bar, and if you can figure out a way to get water and heat it, we’ll eat that freeze-dried stew, too.”

  “If I was alone, I’d probably resist the urge to destroy potential evidence,” he said.

  “You’re with a teenaged boy and a five-year-old—the very definition of eating machines,” she said. “I don’t care to listen to either one of them whine about being hungry if I can help it.”

  “What about you—aren’t you hungry, too?” he asked.

  “If I could get away with it, I’d claim that whole chocolate bar for myself.”

  Jack squeezed her hand, then glanced at Brian. “Brian doesn’t strike me as much of a whiner.”

  “He’s incredible. And what he’s been through gives me nightmares. I want to wrap him up and feed him homemade cookies and then I want to find his lousy excuse for a father and box his ears and tell him exactly what I think of him.”

  “I love it when you’re fierce.” He kissed her cheek.

  She closed her eyes. “Sometimes it’s what keeps me going.”

  “I want to wrap you up in blankets and feed you cookies,” he whispered. “I want to take care of you, the way you take care of others.”

  She opened her eyes and the soft look in them made him set aside, if only for a moment, the pain in his leg, worries about the men who were hunting them and the urgency of stopping a group of terrorists bent on destroying the country.

  “This whole ordeal has given me a new perspective on the work you do,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think I realized before what a real threat the people you go after are. I mean, I knew it in the abstract, but now I’ve seen up close how ruthless and, well, evil, they are.” She squeezed his hand. “What you and other men and women like you do is really important. I hate to think what the world would be like if people like Gordo and Anderson and the others were allowed to carry out their plans unchecked.”

  “Don’t make me out to be some kind of hero,” he said. “I have to live in this world, too. A lot of what I do is about self-preservation.”

  “You can pretend that, but I know different. Nothing you’ve done the last few days has been selfish. You didn’t have to go to that fishing camp to rescue Ian, and you didn’t have to come looking for me when those men grabbed me. You walked right in to what you had to know was a trap. You did it because you put our safety above your own.”

  “You and Ian are important to me. I thought you knew that by now.”

  She ducked her head, so that he could no longer read the expression in her eyes. “What I’m trying to say is that everything that has happened makes me realize I’ve been looking at some things wrong. With Preston—I used to think he chose his job over time with family because the work was so macho and exciting. He enjoyed the rush more than he enjoyed nights at home reading bedtime stories or talking to me.”

  “The job can be macho and exciting, and anyone who tells you they don’t enjoy the rush is lying.” Jack slid his hand up to caress her shoulder. “But none of that is more important to me than the world away from work. That everyday life, with the people I love, is the real world. The one that really matters. The one I’m working to protect.”

  “I guess it really is all a matter of perspective,” she said.

  “I didn’t know your husband, or the kind of man he was.” Jack chose his words carefully, aware that he was treading on sensitive ground where maybe he had no right to trespass. “But he loved you enough to marry you, and he gave you a great son. If he lost sight of his priorities sometimes—it can happen to the best of us.”

  She nodded. “I know. I forgot about what is really important, too. You’ve helped me remember that.”

  He wanted to ask her what he had done to change her thinking. Was she trying to tell him that his being a law enforcement officer wasn’t such a black mark against him anymore? That she could see a future with the two of them together? But now, when they were still in so much danger, didn’t seem the right time to press her.

  “Mom, I’m hungry.” Ian made Jack’s decision for him by crawling into his mother’s lap and giving her a mournful look.

  “I’m sorry we don’t have any dinner to give you.” She rubbed his back.

  “Jack has chocolate and he’s not sharing.”

  Three pairs of eyes regarded Jack—two of them accusing, one sympathetic and maybe a bit amused. “All right, all right.” He held up his hands. “We’ll eat whatever is in that pack. But you have to let me unwrap everything so I can at least try to preserve the wrappers in case there are fingerprints.”

  “Great!” Brian shoved the pack over to Jack. “I’m starving.”

  Using his pocketknife and two fingers, Jack opened the pack and eased out the chocolate bar and two granola bars. He slit the wrapper from each, shook the contents into his lap, then passed them to Andrea. “You divide everything up,” he said.

  She broke each granola bar in half and distributed the pieces. “Give mine to the boys,” Jack said.

  She started to argue, but apparently, the look in his eyes or the set of his jaw made her think otherwise. “All right.”

  Brian accepted a chunk of granola bar and sat back. “You know what’s funny?” he said.

  “What?” Jack asked.

  “There aren’t any maps in there.” He nodded to the pack. “You’d think a guy going hiking in the mountains would at least have at trail map.”

  “Maybe he knew the trail really well,” Andrea said. She broke off another section of granola bar and handed it to Ian.

 
“That’s not it,” Jack said. “The man who owned this pack, Mark Renfro, had a photographic memory. He had probably memorized the map.”

  “Seriously?” Brian asked. “I thought that kind of stuff was only in movies.”

  “Jack remembers faces like that,” Andrea said. “He truly never does forget a face.”

  “That would come in handy picking people out of a police lineup,” Brian said.

  “That it does,” Jack said. If only he could remember the man who had murdered Gus. Pain pinched his heart at the thought, but it wasn’t as sharp as before. He hadn’t thought of his friend, or his own failure to remember the killer’s face, in a few days. Was it because he had been preoccupied or, as Andrea had suggested, was he learning to live with that blank spot in his head?

  “I guess you’re pretty sure this is Mr. Renfro’s pack,” Brian said. “Since his wallet is in there. Too bad he didn’t stash his phone in there, too.”

  “The phone would be dead after all this time,” Andrea said.

  “Not if he shut it off.” Brian shrugged. “I guess we couldn’t get that lucky, huh?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, studying the pack. Back there in the mine tunnel, he had given the contents only a superficial look, reasoning he could examine it more thoroughly when he had it back at team headquarters. But now he noticed zipped pockets on the sides that he hadn’t bothered to open before. He reached for the zipper on one of them now.

  The cell phone was an older, no-frills model, not even a smartphone. But that meant no apps or Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to drain the battery as quickly.

  “I don’t believe it!” Brian whooped. “You found a phone.”

  Jack flipped open the phone. The screen was black. But when he pressed the on button, it glowed with life.

  “Quick, call for help before it dies,” Andrea urged.

  Jack was already up and heading for the mine entrance.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Outside, dusk had descended and the first stars were visible in the clear sky overhead. Jack punched in the number for Ted Blessing. He groaned as it rang three times, then four. On the fifth ring, Blessing’s clipped voice asked, “Who is this?”