by Dale Mayer
“What?” Axel said, trying to get through the convoluted explanation.
“It was really confusing,” she said, “but I think they were trying to steal the sub, which is state-of-the-art, so it makes sense, and they needed the navigation system, but something went wrong, and I don’t know what.”
“Did he think that Hostettler might have just changed his mind?”
“Maybe. Maybe Hostettler saw the shooter kill everybody and realized just how volatile the guy was. Or maybe Hostettler didn’t realize that it would be murder for everyone. Or that he would end up the victim of a gun shot himself.”
“Only a fool goes into a battle like this without realizing that potential,” Axel said. “Betrayal seems to be the number one game in town.”
“About six more blocks,” Baylor said.
Axel quickly made those turns, as instructed by the GPS, then realized nothing was here. “How close does this navigate to?”
“Not nearly close enough,” Baylor said.
“We’ll have to drive around a few corners here. Ally, are you there? Can you hear me?”
“I’m here,” she said, but her words were slurring.
That worried Axel more than anything. That wasn’t fatigue as much as it could be was a brain injury thing. When she didn’t answer, it worried him even more. “Ally, talk to me,” he said. “Where are you? Can you see if you’re at a corner? Can you see if you’re on a side street? What can you tell me about what you see?” He spoke urgently, his voice hard, clipped. Trying to get her attention.
“Apartment building,” she whispered, “across the street. I don’t know what’s beside me, a mailbox maybe, something big, but it’s green.”
“We’re coming around the corner, trying to find you.”
“White van,” Baylor said, pointing. “At that corner.”
Racing toward it, Axel parked his vehicle at an angle in front of the van, and they both jumped out and raced forward. Axel went around to the side where the large passenger door was and pulled it open. There she was, but she was barely conscious. She was still holding the gun, but her arm wavered. He took the gun away from her and quickly emptied it and shoved it into his belt. “Take it easy, sweetie. Take it easy.”
She looked up at him with a lopsided grin. “I waited,” she said proudly, then promptly collapsed onto his arm. Meanwhile, Baylor checked over the gunman and said, “She’s right. Looks like she did nick an artery in his leg. He’s in bad shape.”
“He’s also a tricky bastard,” Axel said.
“I know, but I don’t think he’s too far gone.”
“Give the ambulance the location, and make sure they get here fast. See if we can check his ID and anything else on him before we get bumped out of this.”
“Already on it,” Baylor said, as he busily checked the shooter’s pockets. He found a wallet with a driver’s license and a little bit of cash. He quickly took photographs of all of it and said, “A license is here, but it’s not likely the driver. It says he’s forty-seven years old. This guy doesn’t look like he’s more than early thirties.” He shoved the wallet back into the pocket and checked the rest of them.
“What about the dash and the glove box? I can’t check anything,” Axel said, holding onto Ally, “but I’m taking photos of the rest of the interior here, just in case there’s anything.”
By the time the cops and the ambulance arrived, Axel and Baylor had done as much as they could. The gunman was transferred to a gurney and taken up into the ambulance, but, since only one ambulance was here, and they took off with the murderer, it pissed Axel off to know that Ally would have to wait. “We’ll drive her to the hospital ourselves,” Axel said to the cops. And, with Baylor driving this time, Axel carried her in his arms to the back seat of his Jeep, and they took off.
“How bad is she?” Baylor asked.
“Blood’s pouring off her head,” he said. “It’s her second head injury in as many days, and that’s bad news. Looks like she busted the stitches in her good leg somehow.”
“At least the bad leg is in a cast, so hopefully nothing there got messed up,” Baylor said.
“Yeah,” Axel said, “but she doesn’t look very good.”
“Hold on,” Baylor said. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”
As Axel stared down at her, his fingers gently stroking her cheek, Axel murmured, “What the hell did they do to you? Hang tight, sweetheart. We’re almost there. You’re almost safe.” And in spite of every warning inside him not to, he leaned over and kissed her gently on the cheek.
Chapter 11
When Ally woke up, that same damn sledgehammer pounded in her head that she remembered from days earlier. She groaned and shifted in the bed, chilled and then hot, chilled and then sweating. And she couldn’t get warm. As soon as she did get warm, she couldn’t stand the blankets on her. She heard a voice talking to her on the other side, but she didn’t know which side. Was this death, or was it life? She didn’t know if she cared anymore. But she remembered something about the voice; it was soft, but it had been yelling at her last time. She frowned. “Are you still yelling at me?” she murmured.
“Maybe,” he said, no laughter in his voice. “I want you to wake up to make sure you’re okay.”
“Of course I’m not okay,” she said. She opened her eyes briefly and then gasped at the light pounding against her eyeballs. She quickly slammed her eyelids shut. “And apparently I won’t be okay for a few more days yet.” She groaned. “Who let the sledgehammers back into my skull?”
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart. That’s another head injury.”
“Just because I’m smart, people don’t need to try to kill off the little gray brain cells,” she murmured, and she shuddered again.
“Are you cold?”
“I go cold and then hot,” she said. “I can’t seem to get warm, and then I just sweat.”
“That’s the shock,” the nurse said from the other side of her. At least she thought it was a nurse. Why the hell was the nurse here anyway?
“Plus, it looks like you’re running a bit of a fever,” she said. “We’ll try to keep you warm, while you wait for the doctor.”
“You’ll probably need an x-ray,” Ally said.
“Why is that?” the nurse asked.
“Because it hurts way worse than last time. It hurts like really, really bad,” she whispered. “I’m about to be sick.” And, with that, both Axel and the nurse jumped into action, and Ally was gently rolled to the side of the bed, where she threw up into the bag the nurse produced out of nowhere. Ally groaned as she lay here, her whole body shaking with dry heaves. “I could do without that.”
“That’s from the pain and shock,” the nurse said. “Here’s some water to rinse your mouth with.” When Ally rinsed her mouth and spat it back out again, they helped her lie back gently on the bed. Once again the shivering started, and the nurse responded quickly with a heated blanket.
As soon as Ally felt it, she almost moaned in relief. “I didn’t know I could be so cold,” she whispered.
“Well, this will warm you up,” Axel said. “The problem is, you’ll start sweating again.”
“Right now I don’t care,” she said. “It just feels like there’s no heat in my body at all. Even my face is freezing.” He gently laid some of the warm blanket across her cheek. She moaned and brushed into it. “Did you get him?”
“We’ve got him,” Axel said, “but he’s unconscious, and he’s here in the hospital with you.”
“I probably damn-near killed him, didn’t I?”
“There’s a good chance he could lose that leg,” he said.
“That’s the least of what he should be worried about,” she murmured.
“I agree,” he said.
“Oh my, does that mean Thomas’s brother, Webber, was in the navy? I mean, active navy?”
“Seems he was,” Axel said, “but dishonorably discharged for stealing. We’re looking deeper into his file. But it looks
like the seeds of discontent were already there. And stealing? … Well, stealing a sub is just a bigger item than whatever he was kicked out for. And he might have wanted to get his own payback.”
And that’s when she realized Axel was holding her hands. She squeezed his fingers. “Thanks for finding me,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I could have hung on.”
“Somebody probably would have found both of you unconscious in that van eventually,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have been a pretty sight.”
“No,” she said, “I can’t imagine it would have been. Anyway, I’m grateful.”
“It’s all good,” he said. “Now what we have to do is track down the rest of what’s going on in your world.”
“There shouldn’t be anything,” she said. “It should have been a simple IT job.”
“So maybe you need to tell us a little more about what the job was?”
“We were just testing out the sub,” she said. “It was a maiden voyage, and we were doing—Wait. I can’t remember all of what he said to me,” she said, her teeth chattering, “but I remember some of it. They were planning to steal the sub. They had one guy inside, Hostettler, and Webber, who got on board without anyone knowing—Webber is Thomas’s brother. None of that should be possible. You know that, right?”
“In theory, none of this stuff is ever possible,” he said. “Checks and balances are in place for all of it, but, when people really want to get around it, we know all too well that they can.”
“Right. So Thomas’s brother is the extra man on board, probably hiding in the HVAC system. He’d seen me pulling out some wires from the navigation system and mistakenly thought I was tearing it up. I was just changing out components, fixing the problems. His partner was Hostettler, who apparently was part of this whole thing, and somewhere along the line, he got to my navigation equipment, and I assume sabotaged the sub, although I’m not positive it was him. I had found something was wrong and sounded an alarm that we were in trouble. So we end up going down and sinking. Then this guy, Thomas’s brother, takes over and shoots everybody, not yet realizing what Hostettler’s done, and, instead of Thomas’s brother piloting the sub out, we’re stuck on the ocean floor.” She stopped. “Wait. But that means he had to have that kind of experience. Could he pilot a sub?”
“You’ve got a point there,” Axel said. “Not very many people know how to man a sub. But he had been navy anyway, so that training is certainly possible.”
“I think Hostettler was probably supposed to do it with him. And maybe they had another team coming or something to pull them from the sub at the bottom of the ocean.”
“But then what? When their rescue came, they decided to leave the sub behind?”
“Maybe Hostettler or Thomas’s brother couldn’t fix it. Maybe they decided there was no time or,” she said, “I had sent out an alarm,” she whispered. “Several actually.”
“So maybe the two bad guys knew the alarm would bring help, so they decided to abort and live to steal another day.”
“Maybe,” she said softly, with a tired sigh. “I don’t know.”
“The fact that you sent out the alarm should go a long way to clear you. If there’s any proof of that?”
“No clue. I sent it, but it doesn’t mean the transmission went anywhere. I just couldn’t understand why nobody came. It seemed like it was forever.”
“You were really badly hurt, sweetheart. It’s a wonder you managed to stay alive.”
“Well, the whole thing made for a couple really shitty days,” she said. “I’ve had about enough of those.”
“Hopefully this guy survives his surgery,” Axel said, “and maybe we can get some answers from him.”
“I got the feeling that he didn’t really care. Like he was out of here either way, but I don’t know exactly what that meant.”
“It does make sense that a foreign country was behind this,” Axel said thoughtfully. “Either that or somebody with deep-enough pockets to steal their own sub.”
“It was small, as subs go,” she said. “More of a research vessel—that’s what we would use it for. But, when I was testing it, I kept getting a stealth error.”
“Well, with stealth features, it could be desirable for a lot of people,” Axel said, frowning at the thought of a broader pool of potential suspects. He’d need Mason’s help on that.
“With enough private money, they could certainly have paid these guys to steal it,” she said.
“American bank accounts were checked. It will take longer to look at offshore accounts though. And, of course, Swiss banks aren’t helpful in any way.”
“But money talks, and—for something like this—big money would be required. So sounds like a foreign government financing such an effort.”
“Interesting that it wasn’t stolen though,” he mused. “A lot of investigations are ongoing into foreign powers right now. Wonder who’d pay and be bold enough for something like this. I favor Russia myself. Seems like they’ve always been there, and that threat has never quite been removed.”
*
Axel stopped and thought about it, then quickly sent Mason a text, asking about the alerts. Mason replied that he hadn’t heard anything about it but would check. While he was busy texting Mason, he noted that Ally appeared to be falling asleep. A sound at the door caught his attention. Baylor was there and motioned to him. With another look at Ally, Axel got up and walked over.
Baylor nodded toward the bed. “How is she?”
“Pretty trashed,” he said. “Really tired and pretty sore. A little shocky still.”
“Is her head okay?”
“I think we’re waiting on x-rays,” he said.
“Okay. I took a photo of Thomas’s brother before in the van, and we ran him through some databases. We already knew he’s former US Navy and known to work for the Russian government at times.”
“That’s interesting,” Axel said. “He doesn’t look or sound Russian.”
“No, although the Russians have a decent force of American and English agents they use.”
“Well, that sucks,” he said. “You’d expect a Russian agent to sound that way at least.”
Baylor chuckled. “I know, right?”
“Any sign of connections to Ally?”
“That’s what I need to find out,” he said. “If you’re okay in here, I’ll sit out in the waiting room with my laptop and work on that.”
“Sounds good. Send what you have to Mason, will you? Tesla’s got access to all kinds of databases.”
He nodded. “Sure. I’ll do that right now.”
With that little bit of a progress, it didn’t take long to get some history back. As Axel sat here by Ally’s side, his phone buzzed constantly. Finally Mason called him.
“So there was a connection. Ally’s shooter and kidnapper looks to be Thomas’s brother.”
“So why was he so upset at Ally and her half brother Rory?”
“Rory and Rory’s friend Thomas were gay and were a couple,” he said. “And while Ally’s family was somewhat okay with the relationship, Thomas’s brother had more of a challenge with that.”
“And the limp?”
“The limp is Webber’s alone, per his US Navy record.”
“Right,” Axel said. “She told me that Thomas didn’t have a limp, but this new guy, at the sub and at the hospital, looked like Thomas, who is dead, but also had a limp.”
“I agree with her. According to this, it looks like her shooter is also her kidnapper and is actually Thomas’s brother.”
“Exactly.”
Chapter 12
Ally woke up, once again feeling like the sledgehammers were at work inside her head. But the shakes had calmed down, and she didn’t appear to have any abrupt sharp, searing pains. Just that constant hammering. She shifted restlessly in the bed, feeling her hand picked up almost immediately. “Axel?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’ve been here off and on all night.”
“I didn’t plan for it either,” he added, “but I did it because it’s what I needed to do.”
“I wouldn’t have thought I was still in any danger.”
“I’m not taking any chances,” he said with a smile. And he leaned over, kissed her on her uninjured temple, and said, “How are you feeling?”
“Rough, but better than whenever that was.” Then her gaze widened. “Do you guys still have him? Is he alive?”
“Yes, and yes,” he answered. “He is alive. He’s under guard.” He could see the relief on her face.
“And the connection with my half brother?”
“Apparently Webber was also in the military,” he said. “Your brother’s friend Thomas had already left the service when he was killed, but his brother was still in active service. He ended up getting drummed out for bad behavior at some point. Yes, it’s Thomas’s brother.”
Her gaze widened at that. “What kind of bad behavior?”
“Stealing, of all things,” he said. “They didn’t have enough proof to do a complete trial, so he was given a dishonorable discharge.”
“And that probably pissed him off,” she said.
“I’m sure it did,” he said. “A desire for revenge was probably boiling in his gut.”
“But why take it out on his brother’s friend?”
“Maybe his brother Thomas turned away from Webber because he refused to accept the relationship between Thomas and Rory.”
“So then, when Thomas and Rory are killed, he blames Rory even more. So Rory was an easy target for his anger, and, when they saw my name on the list, I became the perfect scapegoat?” she asked in disbelief.
“If you have twelve random names, and you recognize one as that of someone you don’t like already, doesn’t that make a perfect person to take it all out on? Or to set up to take the fall?”
“I suppose,” she said. “It’s still a shitty deal though.”