“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” a voice said.
Emily froze and turned to see the old woman from before holding a gun to Kendra’s head. She immediately dropped hers and raised her hands high up.
“That’s good,” the woman said with a humorless smile. “Now if you come with me quietly, neither you nor your daughter will get hurt. Are you going to cooperate?”
“Yes,” Emily said in a flat voice. She was mad. She wanted to rip the woman apart from limb to limb. How dare she point a gun at her daughter?
“Great. Now, let’s go.”
Emily moved close to her daughter as they walked through a deserted part of Lincoln Memorial, parts she could have sworn were not open to the public. She brushed the girl’s shoulder in a move meant to reassure. Kendra glanced at her with a brief smile.
They finally came out at a street. The woman waved them towards a van that was waiting. Kendra got in first. Emily was about to get in when she felt a hand on her arm.
“I’ll have the gun,” the woman said.
Emily tightened her lips, but that was the only emotion she betrayed as she handed over her firearm.
“The earpiece too.”
Okay. How had she known about it? She glanced at the woman, but she just raised an eyebrow and smiled knowingly when Emily handed her the device that she’d had stuck to her ears.
Emily tilted her head to the side, silently asking if that was all. The woman nodded and gestured into the van. After a slight pause, Emily got in and sat beside her daughter. The woman climbed in after them and shut the door just as the van started moving. She pulled off her wig and a ponytail of jet black hair dropped down her shoulder.
“Who are you and what do you want with us?” Emily asked.
“I believe you know what I want.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
The woman laughed. “Okay. First of all, I’m Jade Han. And I’ve been hired to make sure Wayne delivers that lecture on Wednesday.”
Emily could not believe her ears. “The government did this?” she asked in disbelief.
Jade shrugged.
“To be specific, I owed General Carter a few favors.”
Emily stiffened. “General Carter is behind this?”
“You didn’t know? The entire thing was orchestrated by him from the beginning.”
“I don’t understand.” And she really did not. She’d thought that she was prepared for anything, but this…this was just too much for her to stomach.
“The general wants to make sure that Wayne is at the convention. Nothing can compromise that.”
“Is there any depth he won’t sink to?” Emily could not keep the disgust from her voice.
“Probably none,” Jade said. “I mean the guy had his own granddaughter kidnapped from her parents and blackmailed his own son. I don’t think anyone can go much lower than that.”
Chapter Thirteen
Sunday evening, Washington D.C.
“This is too much!” she whispered furiously as she paced about her hotel room. She pressed redial on her cell phone and brought it to her ears. It rang several times and went silent. “Not even a fucking voicemail.”
She glanced at her watch. She had been trying for the past hour to get in touch with her contact to no avail. She was not in the mood for bullshit. After spending several hours at the airport because her flight had been delayed, she was tired and cranky.
She looked now at the men standing in front of her. She still didn’t want to believe the report they’d given her. It seemed so much had already happened before she’d arrived D.C. Too much.
“What do you mean stolen?” she growled at the two men in front of her.
“We were ambushed, ma’am. We had no idea where they came from,” one of the men replied nervously.
“They?”
“Yes. And they were armed. They just grabbed the bag that held it and were gone before we knew what was happening,” the other man said with a shrug.
“What are you? Incompetent?” Mila wanted to know. “I hired you for this job because you assured me that you were capable! I thought I could trust you.” Her frustration was coming through and she did not give a damn.
“We did all we could.”
“What the hell?” She raked a hand through her impeccably arranged coif. This was too much. Too much. All her carefully laid plans were slowly crumbling before her and she knew that she was not handling it well.
She walked to the floor-to-ceiling window at the end of her room and stood there, with her arms folded around her slim body. That prototype was her bargaining chip. With it, she was finally going to be able to demand her due. Now, she had nothing. Nothing, dammit! And that was not acceptable.
“You need to get it back,” she said at last. “Get. It. Back.”
“But, Miz, we have no idea who took it and—”
“I don’t give a damn!” she roared, silencing the man who had been speaking. “I don’t care how you do it, but I want that prototype ASAP!” She refused to accept defeat no matter what. “I’m telling you idiots, if you fail me again I will personally come after you and you don’t want that to happen. Am I clear?”
They both nodded.
“You have twenty-four hours.” She gazed at each one of them to be sure they understood her. When she was satisfied, she gave a curt nod. “Now get out of here.”
Once they were gone she placed a call to her contact. This time someone picked up the call at the other end.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Busy.”
“Busy? What the hell does that mean? I paid you to deliver the damn prototype—”
“Which I did.”
“Hell you did, the prototype got stolen!” She tugged on the strands of hair that had gotten loose from her coif. She was agitated and it was showing.
“Stolen?”
“That’s what I just said and I want to know if you know anything about it.”
There was a long pause.
“Hello? Are you there?” She wanted to stamp her feet with impatience.
“I’m here,” came the cool reply.
“So?”
“Look, our agreement was that I got you the prototype, which I did. I got it to your man. I delivered, Mila. I know nothing about what happened after it left my hands.”
Mila gritted her teeth. She did not want to, but she believed him. And it just made her even more frustrated.
“Wayne?”
“Does not have the prototype in his possession. I would have known if he did.”
“What happed to the child? How did the exchange go?” she asked, more out of idle curiosity than any real concern.
“There was a rendezvous, but it went crazy.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the strangest thing. There was a shootout and at the end of it, both the child and her mother went missing without a trace,” the man at the other end explained.
“Just like that? Did the Chinese get the mother as well?” Against her will, she was intrigued.
“Those that didn’t die, fled. There was a strange woman though…”
“A strange woman?”
“Hmm… An old woman, although that was most likely a disguise. She also vanished without a trace.”
An old woman who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere? “Hmmm…”
“What?”
“It’s just intriguing, that’s all.” Mila said thoughtfully. “Look, I have to go. Keep me posted.”
After she got off the phone, she moved to the armchair in her hotel room and sank into it. Her mind was spinning in different directions. An old woman who appeared out of nowhere…that description had a feeling of déjà vu to it. She had seen that maneuver used once, in Kabul. It was a long shot, but her gut told her that both incidences were related, somehow. And she was going to get to the bottom of it.
She might have lost the prototype and frankly, she did not have a hope of getting it bac
k. But what she really wanted was leverage, and in her line of work she had come to discover that most times, information was a better commodity to trade in.
**
8.00 p.m., an old warehouse somewhere outside Dodge City, Kansas
Far away, somewhere in Kansas, deep beneath an old warehouse, was an underground laboratory. And in that laboratory a man stood silently. Gazing. His dark hair caught back in a ponytail. He stared at the object in front of him, a slight frown marred his otherwise flawless face. There was nothing spectacular about the object that so completely held his attention. It was nothing more than a weirdly-shaped drone. Except, it was more than just a drone. That single machine had the capacity to unleash such devastation in the right hands. Or the wrong hands…whichever.
He stroked his short beard in silent contemplation, then walked over to one end of the lab and pressed a button on a wall. There was a quiet whirring sound, then a part of the wall slowly went up, revealing a secret room hidden beneath the panel. He took a step into the room and surveyed the beautiful drones resting on their perches. There were about a dozen or so of those. Almost exact replicas of the one sitting in the other room.
They were his life’s work. The culmination of years of hard work and planning. Soon his plans would begin to bear fruit. Not just yet, but he could feel it. Very soon.
He heard footsteps and took several steps back. Then he depressed the button once more and the panel came down, concealing the hidden room. He turned then and found the woman considering the drone, much in the same way he had just a few moments ago. He walked towards her and stopped just a few steps from her.
“She’s a beauty isn’t she?” he said, referring to the drone.
She nodded. “Yes, she is.”
“Too bad she’s a dud.”
Her head whipped around to stare sharply at him. “What do you mean a dud?”
He laughed then, but even to his ears the laughter was lacking in humor.
“This technology runs on artificial intelligence, you know that. It doesn’t run without a microchip,” he explained. “The microchip is missing.”
She gasped in shock. “That’s not possible.”
“Take a look for yourself,” he said with a shrug. Without the chip, there was almost no difference between that and any other run-of-the-mill drone. The microchip was the real innovation.
“But how could that happen?” she asked in shock.
He gave her a sardonic glance. Seriously? “I don’t know why you are so surprised. You worked closely with Wayne Carter for years. Did you really think he would leave that piece of technology for anyone to find and use?”
“You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head. “He was going to hand that prototype over to the Chinese in exchange for his daughter.”
“How many people know about the chip?”
“Just me,” she said slowly. “The others were killed during the lab raid that day.”
He nodded. “So it would have made no difference to the Chinese. Not in the short run anyhow, and without the hardware he would have been unable to demonstrate the capacity of the weapon. So either way it was win-win for them.”
She looked dazed. “I could have sworn the chip was there,” she muttered thoughtfully.
The man laughed again. “Well, Wayne Carter was always a wily bastard, much like that dad of his actually. Nothing surprises me anymore.”
“So what are we going to do? The convention is only in three days.”
“I’ll just have to make a Plan B,” he said with a shrug.
“I thought stealing the prototype off the folks that stole it in the first place was Plan B?” she asked with a quizzical glance.
“What does it matter? I always like to have a backup plan for the backup plan,” he said with another shrug.
She was quiet for several minutes and seemed to be lost in thought. After a while, she spoke.
“I’m just wondering, you never said why you needed to get your hands on the prototype before the Convention in D.C. Why do you want it so badly?”
He slid a sharp glance her way then looked away. Next he closed the distance between them, drew her into his arms and kissed her soundly. When he drew back, she looked dazed, but her eyes shone with happiness.
“Don’t worry about it, Kitten,” he said. “Just know that after the convention, you and I will be able to retire to a life of luxury.”
She smiled, but it was a troubled smile. He saw it, but when she noticed him gazing at her inquiringly, she tried to mask the concern with a bright smile. But he noticed and that was when he decided that it might soon be time to dispose of her. She had outlived her usefulness.
**
Kendra hugged her arms around her body. She should be scared, but somehow, she didn’t feel scared. She didn’t feel much of anything. She cast a glance at her mother and looked away. She should feel more, shouldn’t she? Happiness? Anger? Anything, except this numbness that had taken over every part of her mind. She looked at the woman again and this time found her looking back. Her eyes were misty and she looked really emotional. That wasn’t something Kendra was willing to deal with, so she looked away.
“Where are you taking us to?” her mother, Emily, asked the woman who had abducted them.
“To a safe house in Arlington,” the woman replied.
“You could let us go, you know.”
The woman snorted. “Fat chance,” she said, flashing a smile. Kendra was intrigued by how much her face changed when she smiled.
“You should let us go,” Emily said.
“Look, I am going to let you go eventually. We just need to be sure that your husband delivers on Wednesday. Once that’s over, we’ll let you all go.”
“You do know that the prototype was stolen, don’t you?” Emily asked.
“We know that one version of the prototype was stolen. But we also know that Wayne Carter always has a backup plan. We’re relying on that.”
“I don’t believe you. What you’re trying to tell me is that you are basing our freedom on an assumption?”
Kendra could hear the anger and frustration in her mother’s voice, but her attention was focused on the blank screen in front of her. Except it was not so blank. She could see the reflection of the road behind.
“You will be safer with us,” the woman replied calmly, which exasperated not just Emily but her daughter as well.
“We’re being followed,” Kendra said quietly.
“What did you say?” Emily asked, turning her body slightly to face Kendra and giving her full attention.
“We are being followed,” she repeated.
Emily kept her attention on Kendra, but it was the other woman, Jade, who spoke.
“How do you know?”
“Every seven minutes, a new car sticks to our tail and the old car disappears.”
Both women turned and looked behind them.
“It’s the deep blue station wagon.”
“I see it,” Emily said curtly.
Kendra knew she would. The car had about four Asian men in it and they all looked somber and determined.
“Shit. This is not good,” Jade said.
“We’ll need to ditch this van,” Emily said. “And you need to give me my firearm.”
Jade hesitated.
“We can try to outrun them.”
Emily shook her head impatiently and remained silent. But Kendra could feel the tension radiating off her.
“Do you at least have an extra bulletproof vest?” she asked.
Jade shook her head.
Kendra saw her mother clench her hands then she shrugged out of her shirt, unstrapped the bulletproof vest she was wearing and held it out to Kendra.
“Here, wear this.”
“But…” Kendra stared at the ugly black vest and looked helplessly at the other woman.
“Wear it, Kendra.”
“Emily, you are going to need th—” Jade began, but Emily held up a hand halting her.
>
“Just stay out of it!” she snapped. Then she turned to Kendra. “I want you to wear it. Please.”
Kendra slowly took the vest from her mother. She did not like the way things were going. Her mother needed the vest, if anything happened and the people in the car behind them opened fire, her mom would need to be protected.
She looked up at her mother and saw the pleading and determination in her gaze. She was not going to take no for an answer. With a sigh, she shrugged the vest on over her top and snapped the sides.
When she was done, she shifted her gaze to Emily. The older woman had put her shirt back on. She nodded then took off her wristwatch.
“Wear this. If anything happens, I want you to run to safety. Then press this button here. It’s a communication device. You will get one of my people. Explain to them who you are.”
“What? You had that on you all the while?” Jade asked in surprise.
Emily gave her a look that said clearly what she thought of the other woman’s intellect. Kendra hid a smile.
Emily took Kendra’s hand, drawing her attention.
“Promise me you will get to safety.”
Kendra met her mother’s solemn gaze. “I promise,” she said.
Emily reached out with her other hand and brushed Kendra’s hair gently. Her smile was half sad.
“I never stopped searching for you. And if we do get separated, I won’t stop until I find you again. I promise.”
The lump started in her chest and rose up until it filled her throat and choked her so that she could not speak. It was what she’d longed to hear for so long. That her parents had never given up on her. That they’d never stopped looking and still wanted her back. She looked down at her mother’s hand on her arm, not wanting her to see the tears that had filled her eyes. She blinked hard a couple of times and when she was sure that the tears were no longer a threat, she raised her eyes to her mother’s and nodded.
She opened her mouth to speak when a large refrigerator truck came out of nowhere and cut off the road ahead of them. The driver slammed on the brakes and the van screeched to a halt. Kendra heard herself screaming. Emily applied pressure on the girl’s arm.
“Ouch!” She snatched her arm away and rubbed at the sore point. But she’d stopped screaming.
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