Hotter Than Wildfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  “Shit!” Harry and Sam turned to Mike, who was pointing to the monitor that showed the building’s security cams. “She didn’t make it to the FBI. Look at that!”

  The three men watched in horror at the scene unfolding. Mike had rewound. The white letters in the lower right-hand corner said 12:05 P.M. Ten minutes ago.

  Ellen running out of the building, stumbling. The quality of the digital tape was so good Harry could see the silver tracks of tears on her face, the trembling of her hands. She turned right and walked quickly on the wide sidewalk, glancing back often, hoping for a passing cab.

  Across the street a tall blond man stepped out of a Mercedes and ran toward her.

  Harry’s blood froze. Adrenaline flooded his system, making the scene appear as if it were in slow motion, though he knew it was in real time. He was in combat time as he watched the takedown.

  Ellen turning her head around once more, soft, curly hair swinging over her shoulders, wiping at the tears on her face. Hurrying, but slightly unsteady on her feet. Eyes, mouth blurred with shock. He could tell the exact moment she saw the tall blond man running toward her, the slight hesitation. The instinctive attempt to help. As she slowed to see what he wanted, the black Mercedes left the curb, slowly made its way down the street.

  “Oh hell. Haven’t seen him in years.” Mike’s deep voice. Harry nodded without taking his eyes off the screen.

  “Who?” Sam asked. “Who is he?”

  “Piet van der Boeke.” Mike’s deep voice was clipped. “South African merc. Go-to guy for a lot of people. Really good at tracking. He’ll kill if the price is right.”

  That shut Sam up.

  All three men leaned forward as the screen showed Van der Boeke reaching Ellen, clasping her arm…Ellen buckling, Van der Boeke scooping her up, throwing her in the backseat of the Mercedes, which had caught up with them, jumping in the passenger seat, the Mercedes accelerating out of the frame.

  The takedown had lasted less than a minute, smooth and slick. Anyone watching would assume Ellen hadn’t felt well and friends bundled her into a car to take her to the hospital. No one would think that a woman had been seized in the light of day by two monsters who were capable of skinning and scalping a woman.

  All three men exploded into action. “Mike!” Harry barked. “Tell Henry to get the Sprinter. Have him bring it up to the Birch entrance. Stat!”

  The Sprinter was one of the company vehicles, armored and loaded for bear. You could start a small war with the firepower stashed inside the vehicle. And with the gear in neat foam casings, you could climb a mountain, field dress wounds, capture signals off a satellite, beam messages to a satellite, swim fifty miles underwater or blow up a building.

  He captured a still of the license plate, blew it up…“Shit!” he screamed. The license plate was unreadable. Someone had covered it in mud.

  But there was another way.

  He consulted his smartphone, saw that the Mercedes was traveling at seventy miles per hour, heading west.

  Mike was strapping himself into his extra-wide body armor and held Harry’s out to him. Harry talked fast as he suited up.

  “I’ve got a bug on her. We can follow it via GPS on my handheld. They’ve got a ten-minute lead, but we can make that up.” Plans, orders, action. The familiar rush of an op, to keep the panic at bay.

  “As long as they’re traveling, she’ll be okay. If he wanted her dead right away, she’d be meat back on that sidewalk.” Mike had finished suiting up and was already cradling his beloved Remington 850 with a mile of scope.

  Harry met Mike’s sober eyes. If they didn’t want Ellen dead it was for one reason only. They wanted something in her beautiful head, and they’d shown what they were willing to do to get it.

  Harry’s stomach clenched as he thought of that young woman slumped in the chair. The insectoid digitized voice had said she was alive, but she wasn’t. No one could survive injuries like that, but he’d said it to scare Ellen. To flush her out of hiding.

  Prickles ran under his skin at the thought of Ellen—beautiful, gentle, talented Ellen—in these men’s hands.

  Both men took the time to check their weapons thoroughly. An extra minute wouldn’t necessarily cost Ellen her life, but a weapon that misfired could get her and them killed pretty damned fast.

  Sam was suiting up too.

  “Sam, stop it.” Harry put his hand over Sam’s holster. “This isn’t your fight. You stay here with Nicole.”

  “Goddammit, Harry—”

  “It is his fight, Harry.” The three men whirled to see Nicole at the door. “He couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t help you bring Ellen home.” She fixed him with her intensely blue eyes. “So you make sure you bring my husband home together with Ellen, or you’ll answer to me. Do I make myself clear?”

  Harry didn’t need to see Sam to know what he was feeling, but he heard a short sigh of relief behind him. Sam wanted to come with every fiber of his being. Nicole knew that Sam would hate being left behind. Her words released them.

  “Let’s go!” Harry shouted and they ran out the door.

  At first, Ellen couldn’t figure out what was going on, where she was.

  She came back to consciousness slowly, a heartbeat at a time. Hands restrained in front of her, soft background hum. The smell of leather and dust and feet and some acrid chemical, a bitter taste in her mouth.

  Her eyes flickered open for just a second, then closed again. It was too much of an effort to keep them open, and there was nothing to see. Her nose was ground against something soft and gray.

  Her eyes opened again, stayed open a second or two. She struggled to make sense of what she was seeing. It was hard to focus, to concentrate while she was swaying back and forth with the movements of…the car. Of course!

  She was in a car, had fallen off the backseat, and her face was grinding into the footwell. She couldn’t use her hands because they were tied in front of her and the movements of the car prevented her from getting back up onto the seat.

  How did she get here? Where was she?

  “—about twenty minutes from the airfield. The pilots are waiting,” a raspy male voice said, and shock jolted through her system.

  Gerald! That was Gerald’s voice!

  Oh god, oh God, she was in Gerald’s hands. How had this happened? She tried to concentrate, but her head hurt so badly. She felt so dull, so out of it, as if she were at the bottom of some impossibly deep well.

  The car went fast around a corner and Ellen rocked forward then backward, scraping her arm against the seatbacks. Her right arm hurt more than the rest of her, hurt in a specific place, as if she’d been stung by a giant insect.

  She looked down and saw a puncture wound on her right biceps, frowning. A scene flared in her head. She was running…running somewhere. Somewhere important. It was essential that she get there. And…and someone behind her, running toward her. Tall man. Blond. Running, grabbing her arm, blacking out…

  She’d been stung by an injection of some kind of narcotic, and it still clouded her mind. Worse, much worse, she was a prisoner, in a car with Gerald Montez and another man.

  She could remember the blond man, unfamiliar but a type. Hard face, hard, lean body, very fit. A soldier, she’d bet anything on it. A soldier hired by Gerald to find her. And he had.

  It was her worst nightmare, come to terrifying life.

  Helpless. Gerald’s prisoner.

  Heading for a plane in which they’d take her to where he could hurt her as long as he wanted and where Harry could never find her.

  Chapter 16

  Sam drove. Harry wasn’t in any condition to. He said he needed to follow the GPS signal, but all three of them knew it wasn’t that. He’d drive them into a tree or off a cliff if he was behind the wheel.

  He called out directions to Sam because tracking a monitor and talking seemed to be the extent of his motor skills right now. He had to get his head out of his ass, fast. They were heading toward a showd
own and he couldn’t afford nerves, couldn’t afford not to have his head in the game. Even if he was shit scared.

  Not for himself. He’d been trained by the best. Delta operators were the finest elite troops on the face of the planet, SEALs be damned. It had taken an RPG traveling more than eight thousand meters a second to take him down. But two men? With Mike and Sam by his side? No motherfucker on earth could withstand them.

  Except that Ellen was caught right in the middle. Lovely, gentle Ellen, who had no tactics in her, who wouldn’t know how to move, how to find shelter, how to defend herself…She was a gorgeous sitting duck and it was all too easy to imagine her taking a bullet to the head, caught in a crossfire.

  All too easy to imagine her head exploding into a pink mist, imagine her doubled over, gut-shot, insides spilling out, imagine her shot in the back, unable to move.

  God, he couldn’t think straight. It drove him crazy. He couldn’t even sit still in the same space with the images zinging around his brain.

  “Easy.” Mike’s big, strong hand reached out from the backseat and settled heavily on his shoulders. He’d seen Harry twist and turn with the horror of his thoughts.

  He had to stop this.

  He was dragging his buddies, his brothers, the men he loved most in the world, into a firefight where he could get them killed if he couldn’t focus.

  And he couldn’t. Not even clamping down hard on his thoughts the way he’d done in rehab, concentrating so furiously sweat broke out. It didn’t work. His mind kept sliding to Ellen strapped to a chair, glorious hair gone, in its place a red cap…

  His stomach wrenched hard; bile came up. He clamped his jaws shut.

  “Don’t puke now,” Sam said, not taking his eyes off the road. Where traffic allowed, he shot over the hundred-mile-per-hour mark. If Sam weren’t such a goddamned good driver, they’d have killed someone by now. “Puking’s not going to do her any good, trust me on this one.”

  Sam had barfed right into their fancy designer wastepaper basket when Nicole had been kidnapped almost a year ago. “I know what you’re going through, buddy, believe me. But you’ve gotta keep your head, otherwise…” His own jaws clamped shut before he could say anything more.

  They’d all seen that video. They could all imagine Ellen being skinned alive. Maybe…right…now.

  Harry was sweating so hard he stank like a goat. He wiped his hands carefully on his jeans, because whatever was going down, he needed his hands dry.

  “We all set up back there, Mike?”

  “Yeah, got everything handy.” While Harry was negotiating Sam through the streets on the tail of that fucker Montez, Mike had been lining his ducks up in a row. Harry knew that right now Mike could lay his hands in a second on whatever they could possibly need. “We’ll be ready whenever we get a clear shot.”

  Harry glanced down at his handheld, watching the screen.

  Mike looked down over his shoulder. “What’d you bug? Are they going to be able to find it?”

  Harry knew what he was thinking. If there was a bug in Ellen’s purse or in a pocket, they could scan her and throw it out the window when they found it.

  But he’d been smarter than that. Ellen had stepped out three times on smart men, including himself—just slipped away.

  “They can’t find anything, because it’s wrapped up in a special porcelain casing that gives off a signal on a very high frequency. They won’t pick up on it.”

  “And if they throw her purse out the window or make her strip?”

  “Be hard to find it. It’s embedded in her shoulder.”

  There was silence in the van.

  “Jesus,” Sam finally said. “You cut her open and placed a chip in her flesh? Man, you’re braver than I am. The only thing I managed to do was seed Nicole’s hard drive.”

  A year ago Nicole had stumbled onto a terrorist plot and had been kidnapped together with her sick father. They’d been able to follow Nicole because out of paranoia Sam had put a tiny tracking device in the portable hard disk she kept in her purse.

  Otherwise Nicole’s bones would be at the bottom of the bay, still anchored by chains.

  “I didn’t cut her open. She had a wound I stitched shut, remember? I just slipped the tracker in. It’s tiny and tissue neutral and it’s thanks to that we’re able to track her, so shut the fuck up. I was planning on removing it later, anyhow.”

  When that fucker Montez was six feet underground or in a federal prison.

  Harry’s jaw muscles clenched. With Nicole it had come down to a two-second margin, when Sam and Mike had been able to pull the trigger first.

  Please, Harry prayed. Let me pull that trigger first.

  “Mike.” He kept his eyes glued to the display. The Mercedes was tracking steadily west. Montez and Van der Boeke had a clear goal. So what the fuck was it?

  “Yo.” God, it felt good to hear Mike’s steady bass. He knew that Harry was shaken. Mike didn’t have a woman he loved on the line and could be counted on to stay cool.

  Harry didn’t dare take his eyes off the display and the road ahead. “Call the FBI SD Field Office. Number’s 858-565-1255. Ask for Special Agent Aaron Welles by name. Give him a sitrep. I want him where we end up, fast as possible, with the whole cavalry. SWAT, Hostage Rescue, the works.”

  “On it.” Mike’s phone bleeped softly as he keyed in the numbers. “Special Agent Aaron Welles, please. It’s urgent.”

  While Mike gave a concise report, Harry frowned at the moving dot. Where the fuck were they going? He scrolled up the map, extrapolating a few miles ahead of the Mercedes, and saw something he vaguely recognized. Where—?

  “Fuck!” he shouted.

  Mike stopped talking into his cell. “What?”

  “They’re heading for an airfield! Tracy Municipal Airfield. Fuck!” Harry slammed the armrest between the two seats.

  “Shit,” Mike breathed.

  Sam didn’t say anything, but the van leaped forward.

  “If she gets up in the air, she’s lost. We’ll never find her. They can push her body out of the plane at any point they want. They’ll fly over desert and forest. She’ll be lost.” He turned around and looked Mike in the eyes. “Tell Aaron to call it in to the airfield. To block every outgoing flight. Tell him to do what it takes, there’s a kidnapping across state lines by a man who’s killed three times.”

  Mike simply said, “Hear that? Roger.” He closed his cell. “They’re coming in force, Harry. As fast as they can make it.”

  “But we’re the front line,” Harry gritted.

  “Yeah.” Mike’s eyes met his in the rearview mirror. “We’re the front line. Tip of the spear. If we don’t stop them, that girl is gone.”

  They seemed to go off the main roads, over a few bumps in the road, then were off again, racing over unpaved roads.

  Lying down in the footwell, all Ellen could see was empty sky. No telephone poles, no street signs, no buildings, nothing. They drove for maybe a quarter of an hour over roads so rough she could hear and even feel rocks pelting against the underside of the car, and could see plumes of the dust they raised outside the window. Finally, they slid back onto asphalt.

  The two men up front weren’t talking. She had no idea what their plans were, except that she would never survive them.

  Oh God. How could she have made this mistake? And how could Gerald have been just waiting for her? She’d barely stepped outside Harry’s building, hadn’t even had time to flag a taxi, and that blond guy had come running after her. A second later, the big black Mercedes rolled up to where they were.

  They must have been waiting in the car right outside the building. But how? How did they know?

  However they knew, it was too late to worry about it. Actually, it was way too late to worry about anything. She’d reached a dead end, a place where nothing she could do would influence the outcome. She was in the hands of two clever men, strong men. For just the few seconds in which the blond man had gripped her arm, hard, and pulled
her against him, she’d felt tough, hard muscles, the kind Harry had.

  There was no way she could overpower one of these men, let alone two.

  She didn’t even have her wits about her. Her thought processes were slow, sluggish. Making any kind of plan required clear thinking, and that was beyond her. Whatever they’d given her made it almost impossible to think straight.

  Gerald was driving really fast now. Too fast. What kind of road could he be on that would allow him to race like this?

  Though the car had that exceptional soundproofing of expensive vehicles, the occasional dull roar filtered its way into the cabin, a sound that started low and increased in pitch. And a sharp smell penetrated, a smell both chemical and familiar.

  With a wrench of the wheels, the car drove in to some kind of shelter. The sun cut out immediately. As the car slowed down, it passed under something. Something long and metallic…a wing. An airplane wing. The car came to a stop, rocking her painfully forward then backward. She looked up out the window and saw the curved metal and rounded portholes of an airplane hull.

  Even her dulled, hurting head was able to put it together. They’d reached an airport. Somehow they’d bypassed security and gone directly into a hangar and, oh God, a plane was right there.

  Ellen shook. Somewhere in the back of her mind was the idea that somehow, she didn’t know how, but somehow Harry would find her. Would just come galloping to her rescue and prevail, because he was a good guy and the good guys always won, right? Super-Harry to the rescue, swooping down and saving the day.

  Wasn’t going to happen. Couldn’t happen.

  Gerald and his—what? minion? henchman?—whatever he was, they were going to bundle her into a plane and she’d be lost forever. This wasn’t a scheduled flight on a plane belonging to an airline.

  Ellen knew that Gerald operated two planes, one for executives in his company and one he reserved for his own personal use. A Learjet. She knew how much it had cost, secondhand, how much it cost to operate, how much of that cost he deducted from his taxes.