As he entered the freeway merge lane, he glanced in his rearview mirror. He expected to see the black sedan tailing him from a distance.
Not tonight.
A lone vehicle followed several car lengths behind. He could make out the model by its distinct body styling. A Hummer.
He had seen several such cars parked in front of the condominium, all of which were military vehicles.
Spencer punched the gas, accelerated, then began weaving in and out of traffic, testing his theory.
He watched as the Hummer stayed with him.
There was no denying it.
DARPA was following him.
15
THE COLONEL’S CELL phone rang. “This is Hallier.”
“Sir, this is Agent Tamblyn. I have an update for you.”
“Go ahead.”
“I just heard from Evidence Recovery regarding Dr. Coltraine’s vehicle. No foreign prints or DNA. The car’s clean, sir.”
“What about Tech Ops? Did they run the parking garage video?”
“Affirmative.”
“And?”
“Facial recognition confirmed a positive identification on two individuals, both Chinese nationals, here with the support of their government. The male driver’s name is Jun Zhang. The passenger is Yangxing Qin.”
“Did you run them through Homeland?”
“Yes, sir. They’re registered as corporate executives overseeing the American expansion of a Chinese exporting company called Wing Dong Foods. Both have been extended all courtesies of the Chinese embassy.”
“That explains the diplomatic plates.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But it doesn’t explain what they were doing at Dr. Coltraine’s condominium at the time of her disappearance.”
“Copy that.”
“What about Dr. Coltraine’s husband. You said he was on the move.”
“Agent Anderson and I are following him now.”
“Where are you?”
“Gardena. But I think we may have a problem.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s Coltraine. He’s driving like a madman. He’s either taking out his frustration at the disappearance of his wife on the road or he’s trying like hell to avoid us.”
“All right. Give him space. Stay with him, but keep your distance. He may be a person of interest, but he’s not a suspect. At least not yet. What is he driving?”
“A silver Range Rover.”
“You have the plate?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Run it. Get a satellite lock on the vehicle’s position and follow him from your laptop. What about his calls? Are we monitoring them yet?”
“Affirmative. Tech Ops established the trap and trace you requested on both his phone and Dr. Coltraine’s. We’ll be able to track all incoming and outgoing calls on both devices.”
“Good. Keep me informed.”
“Yes, sir.” Tamblyn ended the call.
Jordan commented on the conversation she and Chris had heard through the car’s speaker. “Sounds like your men have a handle on Spencer.”
The colonel nodded. “There’s nowhere he can go that we won’t be able to find him.”
“Finding him isn’t what’s important,” Chris said. “What is is what he does before we do.”
“Are you saying we should violate his civil rights and take him down now without cause, Agent Hanover?” Hallier asked.
“Obviously not,” Chris answered. “I’m saying that maybe he’s better off in protective custody. Perhaps not ordering him to remain in his condo was a mistake. What if he’s as much of a target as Dr. Coltraine?”
“I don’t think so,” Hallier replied.
“Why not?” Jordan asked.
“Because if Qin and Zhang are MSS and wanted both Spencer and your cousin, he’d be with them right now or dead. Trust me, if there are two things I’ve learned about the Chinese Ministry of State Security over the years, it’s this. One, they don’t make mistakes. Two, they don’t leave loose ends.”
“You think it’s possible that Spencer knows where Maddy is?” Chris asked. “Maybe he’s gone after her on his own.”
“I doubt it,” Hallier replied. “He doesn’t exactly strike me as the hero type.”
Jordan raised her hand and placed her palm against the passenger window.
“You okay, J?” Chris asked.
Jordan didn’t reply. She stared out the window into the night.
“Agent Quest?” Hallier said.
“Take the next exit,” Jordan said.
“What is it, Jordan?” Chris asked.
“It’s Maddy,” Jordan replied. “I can feel her.”
“Do you know where she is, Agent Quest?” Hallier asked.
Jordan shook her head. “No.”
“What about the Port of Los Angeles?” Chris asked. “I thought you said—”
“She’s not there,” Jordan replied. “The port is significant. I know it is. But that’s not where Maddy is right now.”
“Then where is she?” Chris asked.
“Close.” Jordan replied. “Something’s wrong.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I can see her. She’s running.”
“From whom?”
“I don’t know. But there are boats. Dozens of them. She’s surrounded by them. Persephone.”
“Persephone?” Chris asked. “What does that mean?”
“It’s where she’s hiding.”
Hallier checked his mirrors, exited the highway, stopped at the intersection. “Which way, Agent Quest?”
Jordan spied the large commercial billboard down the road: BLUE WATER MARINA & STORAGE. 10 MILES. “Right,” she said. “The marina.”
Hallier turned and sped down the road.
16
THE WOMAN WALKED along the gravel pathway, stood over the fallen guard, looked down. “Where is she?” she asked.
“You sh-shot me,” the guard replied. The first two bullets, one to each leg, had dropped him instantly. The third had found his left shoulder. He looked into the eyes of his assailant. “Why?”
The woman leaned forward, pressed the silencer against his forehead. “Where?” she repeated.
“Jesus Christ, lady! What are you talking about? There’s no one else in here but me!”
“Bullshit. I know she came in here. There was nowhere else for her to run.”
The man’s eyes glistened as he pleaded. “Please. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. This is my first round of the night. I didn’t see anyone.”
“How many exits are there?”
The guard pressed his hand against the bleeding bullet wound in his shoulder and groaned. “What?”
“You heard me.”
He nodded over his shoulder. “Just the main gate, back the way I came. But I told you, I didn’t see anybo—”
In the distance, at the farthest end of the boatyard, a machine came to life.
The guard looked up at the woman, his face a mask of sheer terror. He shook his head, raised his hand. “Please. I swear on my children’s lives, no one’s supposed to be here!”
“Liar.”
The guard waved his hand. “No, no, no!”
The woman pulled the trigger, delivered the fatal bullet into his brain, then picked up the flashlight and scanned the grounds in search of the location of the machine she knew couldn’t possibly have come to life by itself.
Whrrrrr…
Several hundred feet away, a platform slowly ascended in the darkness. Someone was at the controls.
Thwup!
Madelaine didn’t hear the muffled gunshot but saw the spark as the slug ricocheted off the side of the metal cage in which she stood. She had handled enough firearms and shot enough guns growing up with her father to know the deflection of a bullet off metal when she saw it. She looked over her shoulder as the too slow to rise platform continued its mechanical ascent. The woman was on the run now, closing the gap
between them with every step. Madelaine looked up. She was still twenty feet from the roof of the adjoining building… from freedom.
Thwup, thwup.
Two more rounds pinged off the boat lift. The first glanced harmlessly off the bottom of the open platform, but the second followed an accurate trajectory, found flesh. Madelaine cried out as the bullet tore through her jeans and grazed her calf. Her leg buckled with the impact, and she fought to keep her balance against the steady rise of the lift. The open design of the basket offered no side panel protection, and she had not secured the safety harness hanging beside her around her waist. When the time came to escape the basket, the luxury of the extra seconds needed to unfasten and discard the belt could mean the difference between life and death. If she were to live, she would need to scamper out of the lift as fast as she could.
She heard the woman call out while still on the run. “Don’t be a fool, Dr. Coltraine! Stop right now and I promise I won’t kill you!”
The bleeding gash on Madelaine’s leg begged to differ.
Ten feet now…
Madelaine looked up. She would be at the roofline in a matter of seconds. “Come on, come on, come on!” she said, urging the machine to climb higher, faster.
The only easy day was yesterday.
Madelaine dropped low and used the serrated floor of the lift for cover, keeping her body pressed against the metal wall of the control panel and her foot on the lift pedal. She watched as the roofline slowly came into view.
Now or never.
As the platform cleared the razor wire atop the marina’s security fence, she stopped the machine’s ascent, yanked the key out of the ignition, then jumped through the side of the open basket and landed hard on the rooftop of the adjoining building.
She was safe, if only for the moment.
Madelaine caught her breath, then rolled up her pant leg to assess the damage inflicted by the bullet. Although it hurt like hell, the wound was minor, a through-and-through.
From somewhere inside the marina, the woman called out her name, then swore.
She’d taken a good look around the yard as she entered the boat lift. The machine had been positioned just inside the electronically controlled rolling main gate. The surrounding fence was twenty feet tall and unscalable due to its crown of triple strand razor wire which angled inward toward the marina. The bottom of the gate offered an inch of clearance from the pavement, making it impossible for would-be trespassers to crawl under it. Madelaine breathed a sigh of relief. Her pursuer was trapped. To follow her, she would have to retrace her steps back to the service road and make her way around to the main gate. By her estimation, if she ran now, she had a decent head start on her, ten minutes, maybe more if her injured leg didn’t hold her back.
In her back pocket, the phone she had taken from the man she had subdued began to vibrate. Madelaine took it out, read the name on the screen: QIN.
She waited until the device stopped vibrating, then returned the phone to her pocket. She pulled the gun from her waistband. In her race to escape the marina, she had forgotten it was there.
There was no more time to waste.
Madelaine searched the rooftop for the service access ladder, found it, then descended it as fast as her wounded leg would permit.
Around her, the night remained undisturbed, the neighboring buildings dark and silent.
From a distance, the faint sound of car tires spinning on loose gravel carried on the night air.
She ran.
17
SPENCER HAD LOST the Hummer for now. If it were DARPA agents that were following him, he surely hadn’t lost them for good. No matter. He had a mission of his own to complete and no one, not even the government’s most highly touted military intelligence and operations organization, was going to stand in his way. In his opinion, they had already failed in their duty to protect his wife and keep her safe. So much for their talk of escalated security precautions, kidnap and ransom protocols, and promises of 24/7 access to the armed safe houses Madelaine had told him about, which she had found more amusing than concerning. There was nothing funny about their current situation. The shattered window of her Porsche was proof of that. No, if anyone was going to find Madelaine, it would be him.
He pulled the Range Rover into a busy grocery store parking lot, pulled out his cellphone, and opened the special app he had downloaded which synced with the tiny microdot GPS trackers he had covertly placed in his wife’s belongings and garments. Within seconds, six blue dots pulsed on the screen, each representing the geographic location of its corresponding microdot. Spencer read the ID names he had assigned to them: PURSE1, PURSE2, JEANS1, JEANS2, JCKT1, and JCKT2. The dots assigned to Madelaine’s purses were in the condominium. PURSE1 had been recovered from her car by DARPA agents and seized for evidentiary purposes. PURSE2 was likely still in her closet where she had left it. The blinking dots for JEANS2 and JCKT2 were also stationary, so they, too, were in the condo. But the microdots for JEANS1 and JCKT1 were on the move. Which meant so too was Maddy.
Spencer felt his pulse quicken. He hadn’t told Jordan and her partner or Colonel Hallier about the hidden devices, partly because he believed they might immediately suspect him of some bizarre ulterior motive for wanting to harm his wife, but also out of fear that if they did, they would immediately shift the spotlight on him and away from the suspects captured on the parking garage surveillance cameras. They might even take it to the next level and start looking for a connection between him and the operators of the black Mercedes, one they would obviously never find but might consider, nonetheless. Should they choose to go down that path, they would succeed only in burning up precious hours which could have been put to better use trying to locate his wife. Every precious second that ticked by without their efforts channeled in the right direction was one more that left Madelaine at risk, and there was no way he would stand for that.
JEANS1 and JCKT1 were miles away from his current location, somewhere in the vicinity of the Port of Los Angeles. Spencer debated whether he should call Jordan or Hallier and tell them about the microdots, but that would just lead to more questions. No doubt Hallier would tell him to stay out of the way, that this was a job for professionals, not an amateur. But it was professionals who had taken his wife, and DARPA had been powerless to stop them. No way. When the time was right, when Maddy was safely back in his arms, then and only then would he call in the military.
The incidents over the last few weeks had disturbed him so much that he had done the unthinkable. He had gone to a local gun shop and purchased a handgun. Unlike his wife, who was raised by her Navy SEAL father and could practically tear down and reassemble a weapon blindfolded, he didn’t possess even the remotest idea of how to operate the gun. Sullivan’s Guns & Ammo, the shop from which he had purchased the Colt semi-automatic 9-millimeter, featured a shooting range in the basement. The owner, Sully, had taught Spencer how to use the gun. Several lessons later, he had become moderately proficient with the weapon. He knew how to eject and reload the magazine, locate and release the safety before firing, and to use the front sight when lining up his shot. He opened the glove box and removed the weapon. Everything about it, including the weight, felt foreign to him. He disliked guns and couldn’t stand the potential for death and human destruction he felt they represented. He had shared his feelings with Sully. The old man set his mind at ease when he told him that he had served with LAPD SWAT for half of his twenty-five-year policing career, owned the gun shop for the last ten years since his retirement, had been a sport shooter since he was a teenager, and that never in all that time had he found himself in a situation when he felt the necessity to discharge his weapon to protect his life or that of a fellow citizen. Brains before bullets and everyone goes home alive, Sully had said. That had been the SWAT mantra. Spencer had taken the advice to heart. He hoped he would be just as fortunate as his gun range mentor and would never have to fire the weapon, much less take a life.
However, in
Maddy’s case, if ever he believed that her life was in immediate danger, he also knew he wouldn’t think twice about pulling the trigger. And he would keep pulling it until the threat no longer existed. He would deal with the aftermath later.
Better for him to be judged by a jury of twelve than his wife carried to her grave by six.
Spencer stared at the screen. The blue blips which had been moving suddenly stopped.
Something was wrong. He could feel it.
The microdot tracking app showed Maddy was thirty minutes away.
He slammed the Range Rover into gear, hit the gas, and tore out of the parking lot.
18
QIN STOOD INSIDE the main gate of the Blue Water Marina and averted her eyes from the glare of the Mercedes’ halogen headlights as Zhang pulled up. She stared at the boat lift operator’s platform resting just above the razor wire high atop the security fence. “Cao!” she swore.
Zhang stepped out of the car. “Where is she?”
“She got away,” Qin replied.
Zhang was angry. “Got away? How could you let that happen?”
“Me? What about you? We wouldn’t be in this situation right now if you hadn’t been so careless!”
The MSS agent slammed his hands on the roof of the car. “Did you see where she went?”
Qin nodded, looked up, pointed. “She used the lift to get to the rooftop next door. I was too far away to get a clear shot.” She sighed. “Smart girl.”
Zhang jumped into the car. “I’ll go after her.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Right now, we have a bigger problem.”
Nemesis: A Jordan Quest FBI Thriller Page 6
