The Search

by Alex Howell

  The car pulled onto the street of his home. All looked relatively normal up and down the road, though Mason was fully aware that if there was a problem, it wasn’t going to be that the neighborhood had erupted into gang violence. It was going to be something with his home—hopefully something incredibly minor.

  But, knowing me, it won’t be.

  Finally, he arrived at his house. From the front, he could see that the grass was fine, the flowers were fine…

  And the door was ajar.

  That was not at all like Clara.

  That was as red a flag as you could get without drenching it in blood.

  Someone was here who should not have been.

  3

  Taking a deep breath to call upon the training that, even after over a decade, was still more instinctive than conscious, Mason pressed the code to his vehicle’s trunk, popped it open, reached under the visible cloth, and pulled out his silenced pistol. He tucked it into his pants, hidden somewhat beneath his shirt, and moved in silently, taking care not to alert anyone who had dared walked into his home that he was about to kill them.

  When he got to the front door, before stepping inside, he pressed himself against the wall closest to the knob, listening for any signs of activity. A giggle. A crash. A scream. Anything that would tell him that either he was making a ridiculous show of trying to be too cautious or properly paranoid.

  But there was nothing.

  He didn’t want to pull out his gun if Clara was there and scare her, even if she was aware of his previous jobs and his gun ownership. The last thing she needed just two weeks before her prom was the sight of her father pointing a gun—it felt like a stereotypical dad joke from the 20th century to make her daughter aware of his weaponry.

  But there was nothing funny about the current situation.

  If Clara got scared, that was a consequence of the situation. It wouldn’t have been the first time that Mason, fearing the unfolding of something terrible for his daughter, had pulled out a gun, but the closest Clara had ever gotten to one pointed at her was when Mason took a toy gun and had her practice self-defense moves when one was pointed at her. If he saw her here, he had enough reaction and instincts to keep the gun pointed far, far away from her.

  He slowly pushed open the door, peering inside.

  “Jesus.”

  The place was a wreck.

  Couch cushions had been picked up, thrown about. Paintings that had decorated the wall had been taken off their nails, torn through in some cases. Shattered glass sprinkled the floor, book cases had fallen to the floor, and curtains were ripped from their windows. It was as if someone had had a personal vendetta against the Walkers and had made it a point to destroy everything possible in the home.

  “Who the hell…” he grumbled to himself.

  Now, he definitely didn’t care if Clara got scared.

  He pulled out his pistol and removed the safety, prepared to fire at a split second’s notice. Whoever did this was going to get a stern talking to before—if—they were lucky enough to have the cops called on them.

  More likely than not, Mason was going to have to rely on his old skills with guns.

  The damage only seemed to increase as he moved through his house. The kitchen table was flipped on its side, the outdoor patio was also flipped around, and various family photos lay torn out on the ground. It was dawning on Mason that this was not the action of someone who just wanted to come through and cause a ruckus—this was someone who must have known Mason in some fashion and wanted to send a message.

  No better way to send a message than by striking at that which you most love. Which means Clara…

  Mason gave thought to calling out for Clara, but if she was being held hostage, that was a good way to make her captors aware of his presence. He had a terrible feeling he was being watched from a place where he could not see the enemy—the curse of the captors knowing his location—but with nothing to do about it, he could only follow his training to the best of protocol, hope it worked out, and react if necessary.

  But now, his training required something critical of him.

  He faced a choice—the basement or going upstairs. Going upstairs was where they were more likely to be, but, if he guessed wrong, the enemy would hear him moving around and be able to escape. Modern technology, it seemed, had not yet erased the creaking of old houses.

  On the other hand, going downstairs was just Mason’s weaponry and security footage behind a locked door, making it unlikely that anyone was there, but no one here would know he was heading there. He’d be able to check quickly to see if anyone was still in the house if so. But, then again, if someone had gotten behind that locked door, Mason was almost certainly going to be dead.

  He chose to go upstairs, trusting his instincts and training to handle the situation if Clara was still here.

  If…

  Clara, please be Ok. I’ll get you out of this one way or the other.

  He approached her room nervously, noticing that it was swung wide open. He pressed himself against the wall, listening as closely as he could for breathing, signs of distress, or anything resembling life. Even the turning of a page, the sound of a fan blowing from up above, or anything of that sort would give him the feeling of relief that he so desperately craved.

  But once more, he was answered by the sound of silence.

  By now, Mason felt quite confident that he was alone—whoever had come here had already left. Already left… with…

  His training would not allow him to get lazy, however, and he moved into her room, gun aloft. The better that he focused on the task at hand, the less that he had to worry about the dark thoughts that would enter his head.

  Clara’s room was empty.

  But that didn’t mean it, too, wasn’t also destroyed. Her book cases, her study desk, and her mirror had all been destroyed. Her bed sheets were on the ground. Unlike the other rooms, though, this one wasn’t so much destroyed as it looked like a fight had taken place. The way things had fallen apart in here suggested…

  Then Mason noticed something strange.

  The carpet by her bed looked scrunched up, as if…

  As if she had grabbed on while someone pulled her away.

  Oh no. Oh, Clara.

  He looked for blood, fearing the worst for his daughter, but when he saw none on the ground or on the bed, he felt momentary relief.

  But the relief was washed away by the reminder that wherever Clara was, she was not safe. She had been taken. And given that she was taken, there was no guarantee she would avoid the fate Mason had most feared for her.

  For his own sanity and safety, he went through the other rooms in a hurry, fearful of a potential ambush, but as he expected, those rooms were empty as well.

  They came here for her.

  But why?

  And who is “they?”

  “Clara!” he called out, fully aware by now that whoever was here would know he was also here.

  But he got no reply.

  “Clara!”

  Again, no reply. He looked everywhere—the bathrooms, the bedrooms, the attics, the backyard shack. She was nowhere to be seen.

  There was only one place he hadn’t checked, and he knew he had to check there now. There was very little chance she was there, and there was a decent chance of him walking into an ambush—a chance certainly greater than anything he had come across, at least, if not an absolute great chance.

  But a life without Clara was not a life worth spending much time contemplating, because it would be even shorter-lived than the thoughts.

  He went to the basement door, decided that the element of overwhelming force was necessary now, given that he’d blown his cover. He shot the lock off the door and kicked it down with a loud roar as he swung his gun around.

  Surprisingly, this place was left completely untouched. His monitors, his weapons, and his notes and files were all left in place.

  I should have known. Wouldn’t have been locked if some
one was in there.

  Damnit, I cannot lose control like this. Stay with it, Mason.

  It was almost like whoever had pillaged the place had wanted Mason to have access to these things.

  Or, perhaps more insidiously, they had not even needed to come down here.

  And then he saw Clara’s phone.

  “The hell?”

  He picked it up and turned it around, as if he might magically discover some clue he’d missed before.

  As it turned out, he wasn’t as wrong as he expected.

  On the back, on a yellow sticky note, were two words.

  “Safety room.”

  It was not in Clara’s handwriting. How the… how would… who would know I had a safety room?

  I’m not dealing with some common criminal. I’m not dealing with some jealous ex lover. This…

  Mason feared the worst.

  His past had quite possibly caught up to him in some fashion, all of these years later. He didn’t want to think it real, but…

  There was only one person who had ever known of this place, and Bree had been dead for several years. She had never spilled a secret of Mason’s, and he found it very hard to believe that suddenly, all these years later, she had told something to someone that had finally come back to bite him. Someone—some enemy, someone with a ties to someone he had hurt in the past—had been spying on him, he now realized. Someone knew far more about him that he was comfortable with.

  And that someone, when Mason found them, was going to suffer quite a bit.

  He went to the safety room, full of more security footage and more weapons. The screens were black. Mason tried to turn them on, but it didn’t do any good, even though it showed that the monitors were on. He realized, much to his dismay, that whatever the feed was, it was of a pitch black area.

  Because of course. Whoever did this covered their tracks very well. They aren’t going to just let me find her that easily.

  Frustrated, he went back to his tablet and went through security footage of the last hour.

  It didn’t take him long to realize what had happened on a very quick, simple level. In fact, the simplicity of it told him that whoever had done this had not given a rat’s tail about being caught on camera.

  Clara had come home at about 11:36 a.m. for her lunch break and gone to her bedroom. She was simply taking a nap—there was no one around her, no boys. Mason knew he should have trusted that she wasn’t doing something so willfully wrong.

  But then, four minutes later—approximately thirty seconds before Mason had texted Clara asking if she needed him to grab anything for their trip—five armed men burst in. Immediately, they went about causing as much mayhem as they could, obviously destroying as much as they could. Despite the complete and utter destruction of Mason’s place, it was very obvious that it was a coordinated attack—there was nothing to suggest some hoodlums who thought they had found something of value. In fact, the invaders didn’t bother to take anything on the ground level.

  The chilling part about this was that Mason’s alarm system had never been tripped, which was a near impossibility given the completely overt damage everyone was doing. The only way that was possible was if someone had disabled his home system, but even that seemed virtually impossible. It was set up on a local network, which meant someone would have to be in range of his network or have been with the company that set up the security system.

  And while Mason had long learned conspiracies were not just fodder for Internet forums, but real things, he had a hard time believing someone at the security system would have sold his information out to someone. After all, these weren’t terrorist extremists who wanted to destroy America—this was a publicly traded company that valued the bottom line, and nothing was worse for that than an easy home break-in like this.

  Which meant that someone had to have hacked his system on the local level. And yet, despite that, security cameras didn’t show anyone close by.

  Someone had to have done so remotely… someone who was very good at what they did, because while Mason wasn’t the most tech savvy person, he was aware of the need to be. He had spared no expense setting up the systems necessary to protect his home, and if someone had gotten in, it was because they were a pro.

  Who could have done this? A terrorist group? A highly-sophisticated gang?

  Nothing Mason came up with made any sense.

  In any case, as the men ravaged the house, at one point, someone pointed upstairs. They went into Clara’s room, who by now was hiding under the bed. Unfortunately, hiding under the bed might have worked with playful parents, but it did not work with hardened criminals intent on capturing someone. They had succeeded in grabbing her, and sure enough, she held on for dear life.

  But they had her.

  And when Mason saw her horrified face, shrieking out in terror, he felt sick.

  But he also felt a groundswell of uncontrollable rage. Whoever had done this had worn all black, not just over their bodies, but over their faces, making even their eyes difficult to detect. They might as well have been shadows of the afternoon, sweeping through the area, capturing his daughter without any notice.

  They also, noticeably, went to her room first—an unexpected turn given that her room was not the first door upon climbing up the stairs, but the second. It was as if whoever had come in here knew where Clara slept. The thought only enraged Mason even further, sending him deep into the most hellish of thoughts of what he would do.

  The only thing he had to go by in this instance was their body shapes. And since none of them had a magical third arm, a height of over eight feet, or a weight of over five hundred pounds, that wasn’t going to do any good.

  “Damn it,” Mason muttered, fighting to think of what he could do.

  If his security system was down, it couldn’t have done anything. He literally only had his security footage—a relic of decades ago, a sort of fail safe for this exact type of scenario—and a single note with two words on it. Perhaps someone who could do handwriting forensics could provide their insights, but that just seemed like a stretch. And even if Mason did want to do handwriting forensics, he didn’t much care—he had to rescue Clara, and unless his next door neighbors had some hidden talents, that would take too long to be of any use.

  What was he to do?

  And, then, as if fate or hell was providing him an answer, Clara’s phone buzzed.

  Though Mason did not know the passcode to his daughter’s account, she did have her settings set so that one could see the contents of the message. And perhaps, for the first time this early afternoon, Mason got a good stroke of luck.

  Or maybe he was just being toyed with.

  “Safety room.”

  The same as the note, huh? Maybe they think I’m too dense.

  He looked at the number it had come from, but it was useless—a number of digits so long, it might as well have come from an artificial intelligence. Someone very smart, very good, and very evil was having their way with Mason.

  Fine. I’ll play your game. I’ll do what you say. You’ll think you’ll get what you want.

  And then I’ll kill you for taking my daughter. And it will not be merciful or kind.

  Mason stepped back into the safety room and saw something very, very different than all black screens. It was enough to make him slam his fist on the table with a loud scream.

  He now saw Clara, blindfolded, mouth taped shut, and tied up to a brown chair in a dimly lit room, the only light landing upon his daughter.

  4

  “Clara!”

  Mason put his hand on the screen, as if he could reach out to his daughter, his only child.

  “Clara!”

  He put both hands, looking for any sign of movement. Her stomach was moving softly. Seconds later, she started to squirm, as if having just come back to consciousness.

  She was alive.

  But for how much longer?

  “Clara…”

  Mason’s hands dropped as he
took deep breaths, trying to compose himself. It wasn’t working very well.

  Mason knew how stupid it was to call for someone who could not hear him. He had taught his men to never waste breath, motion, or thought on something that he could not control. A SEAL only concerned himself with that which he could change, nothing more, nothing less.

  And yet, now that it was his only daughter, his only child, sitting there, squirming with noticeable discomfort in an undisclosed location, he couldn’t help himself.

  It made Mason think about all of the people he knew who had kept calm so well under almost any situation… but if someone so much as glanced at their wife or daughter the wrong way, they lost their minds, looking like angry, slighted gangsters. Family, especially women of the family, had a way of instilling a sense of protection in men, and Mason now fully understood that.

  And he was going to get revenge. Whoever had done this… whoever had had the gall to make such a move…

  Mason was going to make them suffer. Mason was going to torture them. Mason was going to kill them, but only after they had felt the kind of pain he felt himself.

  And then his phone rang.

  Mason grabbed his phone and looked at it. The number wasn’t even visible—it was just blocked. He knew this wasn’t a coincidence. He hadn’t suddenly just gotten a call from a bill collector or a telemarketer at an inopportune time.

  This was whoever had kidnapped his daughter.

  He answered it and listened intently for several seconds, trying to pick up who was in the background, if he could hear his daughter—anything for clues that he could use beyond the handwriting and that his daughter was alive.

  He just heard scrambling and a loud, high-pitched noise, similar to what dial-up internet had been like in the late 20th century.

  “Mason Walker,” a scrambled voice said.

  It was blatant computer distortion. Mason had to bite his tongue that he didn’t have call geolocation or tracing software—he never imagined that he would have needed it before today, especially since he was mostly black ops. The enemies he fought almost never knew his name or who he was.