by Nick Thacker
Ben knew they weren’t armed with much more than a sidearm, so whatever defensive ruse Reggie had cooked up was going to be a crapshoot.
And if he was right about Daris…
Time to go with my gut instinct.
He poked Julie in the side.
She frowned, smacking away his hand. “Not n —”
“Hey,” he whispered. He hoped even in a whisper she could pick up on his tone. He wasn’t trying to fool around.
She looked at him, barely moving her head.
Good, he thought. Keep it subtle.
“We need to get ready to bail,” he whispered, trying to keep the words smooth and slow, yet indecipherable by anyone more than a foot away. “There’s a window behind us. You think —”
He noticed the gentle rise of Daris’ arm, the easy, casual pace her shoulder lifted. Her eyes were on the door, but her focus was on the desk. Specifically, a drawer that she was sliding open.
Ben would have missed the nearly inaudible scraping sound if he hadn’t been intently focused on what she was doing. Dari’s shoulder dropped again, and then he heard it.
Click .
The gun came up from beneath the top of the desk, already aimed and pointed directly at Julie.
He didn’t even take the time to yell. He threw his arm sideways, knowing it was a large enough appendage that it would be possible to knock Julie out with it. He hit her, hard, and she flew backwards, a small gasp leaving her mouth.
The pistol fired, the deafening roar of the bullet only reaching Ben’s ears long after the lead had landed.
Thankfully it hadn’t landed in Julie. She was on the floor of the office, spread-eagled, and the bullet had sunk into one of the books on the shelf behind her head, only inches above it.
Ben took in a deep breath, hoping to speed along the adrenaline rush he knew was close by, but he was already moving. He lunged over the desk, flying headfirst directly at Daris and aiming at her head. His large body was going to be his weapon, and he hoped that Daris was as weak as she was small.
He never got the chance to find out. If Daris was lacking in the height and weight department, she was certainly not lacking in nimbleness.
She ducked and fell to the side into a perfectly executed roll, her shoulder barely scraping the rug beneath her desk as she easily sidestepped Ben’s attack. Ben hit the back wall, saw stars, and then fell into a heap behind the desk. His feet landed on the office chair Daris had previously been sitting in.
Daris followed through her juke and came up on one knee, pointing her pistol at Ben while she breathed through a small ‘O’ she’d turned her lips into. She steadied her aim…
Crack!
Another gunshot rang out in the room, then another. Ben barely heard the third shot as his ears were already ringing after the first one, but he was able to swivel around and see who had fired.
It hadn’t been Reggie or Joshua. Instead, a man was standing in the doorway. Larger than Ben, his skin a deep shade of brown, with a thin goatee surrounding his mouth.
The barrel of his pistol was aimed at Daris, but when Ben looked back at her she was nowhere to be found.
Reggie had his own pistol aimed at the new intruder, but the man hadn't moved from the doorway and hadn’t changed the direction he was aiming. Slowly, deliberately, the man lowered his weapon. He stared at the spot Daris had been crouched in only moments ago, his eyes fixed in a permanent scowl.
Ben didn’t move, didn’t speak. An inch difference in the man’s aim would put Ben’s head in the sights of the pistol. He stared, glowering back at the huge black man, but he didn’t move a muscle.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“WHERE IS SHE?” THE MAN asked.
“Who?”
Ben flicked his eyes over to Reggie, who’d spoken from the corner of the room, his gun still fixed on the man in the doorway. Joshua had his weapon in his hand, holding it with his finger ready to pull the trigger but pointing it toward the floor.
“Where is Daris? ”
“She — she was right there,” Julie said. “Right next to Ben. Only a second ago. You had to see her —”
“I did see her,” the man said. “I shot at her. But she’s not here anymore, is she?”
Julie shook her head.
Ben stood up, arms out to his side. The gun followed him, until the man was aiming directly at Ben’s head. He held his hands open, trying to convince the man that he was no threat.
“Talk to me,” Ben said. “I can tell you what you need to know.”
“Okay, fine . Where the hell’d she go?”
“She went… into the floor.”
Ben wasn’t sure if the truth was going to get him shot or earn him a friend. The man was obviously not here to kill them, but he also wasn’t afraid of getting shot himself. Reggie was aiming directly at him, and Joshua was ready with a loaded pistol as well, and the man hardly seemed to notice.
“Into the floor? Where?”
Ben shrugged. “Right where she was standing, I guess. Probably a trapdoor or something.”
“A trapdoor . You’ve got to be kidding me. What is this, a middle-school play?”
Ben shrugged again, then nodded. “She planned all of this out. I saw her, right after you exploded your way in — by the way, thanks for not blowing up this room instead — anyway, I saw her eyes. She was waiting for you. She looked at all of us, like she was waiting for us to get into position or something. Calculating it all.”
The man’s tongue hit the inside of his cheek, and his eye squinted closed. He was deep in thought, and Ben wondered if he was trying to decide if he was telling the truth or trying to figure out what Ben’s statement meant.
Finally he spoke, dropping his pistol. “Move over. We need to find that door.”
Ben slid over so the huge man could search the room. He wasn’t about to let his guard down, and he also wasn’t going to start helping him.
“Who are you, by the way?” Joshua asked.
The man knelt to the floor and started feeling around the edges of a square piece of wood flooring. It was the door, but it was flush with the rest of the room and wouldn’t open by applying pressure to the top of it.
“Derrick,” he answered, gruffly.
“Derrick who ?”
“That is the who, ” he said. “Roger Derrick, FBI.”
“You guys are just coming out and announcing that now?”
He stopped what he was doing and looked up. “No, but you’re already involved in a federal investigation, obviously on to the same lead we’re following, and it wouldn’t convince anyone of anything if I said, ‘I work for the government,’ now would it?”
Reggie grinned. “You and I are going to be friends.”
Derrick squinted an eye in his direction. “I highly doubt that.”
“Why, you don’t have friends?”
“That’s right. I don’t have friends. Now, if you don’t mind, we need to find out how to get this door opened.”
Ben and Joshua walked to the opposite side of the desk, while Reggie and Julie started looking around the room. Ben figured since Daris hadn’t moved from her position behind the desk until she had walked onto the movable platform, the button or activation switch for the door would be somewhere on her desk.
He was right. Just inside the top drawer, impossible to find unless you knew it was there, was a small brass button. He pushed it and Derrick yelped and rolled out of the way as the door fell open.
He scowled at Ben, but then jumped over the opening and slid smoothly down through the floor. Ben rushed over and looked down. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. She’s got a nice little landing pad down here, but she’s long gone.”
Ben waited until Derrick was out of the way and then he too jumped down the trapdoor and found himself in the basement of the American Philosophical Society building.
Julie, Reggie, and Joshua followed behind, but he was already taking a look around the room with Roger Der
rick. Stacks of books, rows of filing cabinets, and shelves floor-to-ceiling on two walls. It seemed like exactly what he imagined the basement of a museum would look like.
Except that the ‘curator’ of this ‘musuem’ wasn’t at all who she’d claimed to be.
Ben turned to Derrick. “Where’d she go? There aren’t any other doors here except the one at the top of the stairs over in the corner, but we would have noticed her leaving — she would have had to walk right by us.”
“Keep your eyes open,” Derrick said. “There’s got to be something on one of the walls. Maybe a door or a crawl space or something.”
“Or she’s a real magician and just disappeared, ” Reggie said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“Do you folks always act so nonchalant? Where I’m from, this is a serious mission.”
Ben saw Joshua frown. He walked over and reached out a hand. “Joshua Jefferson. We’re with —”
“I know,” Derrick said, interjecting. “I read all about it on the flight over. ‘Civilian Special Operations.’ Cute. You have any sort of leader, or are you hippies about your organizational structure as well?”
Ben wasn’t sure if he was more offended by the man’s abrupt interruption and dismissal of them all or the fact that he’d called Ben a hippie.
“You’re talking to him,” Joshua said. “What about you? You guys still operate as teams, or are you the new guy in the office who got assigned to babysitting duty?”
The two men, both clearly experienced professionals in the art of espionage and battlefield tactics, stared each other down for a few seconds.
Or more precisely, Derrick stared Joshua down — he was a full head taller than everyone in the room but Ben.
Finally Derrick’s face split into a wide grin. “Come on, man, I’m just Joshing you.”
Joshua didn’t smile.
“Fine,” Derrick said. “Tough crowd. Whatever. Anyway —” he turned to the rest of Ben’s group who had inadvertently gathered around the two men as if they were about ready to spar. “ — Sorry we got off on the wrong foot. In the world I come from, things are… a bit more sterile . It’s good to loosen up a little.”
Julie smiled, a genuine, beautiful specimen, the one that Ben had fallen in love with nearly a year ago.
“Like I said, my name’s Roger Derrick, and I am with the FBI. No, I don’t have a team on this one, though I’ve still got an office I report to, which means I can probably call in a few favors as I see fit.”
“So be nice to you?” Reggie asked.
Derrick ignored the joke. “I was sent out to just take a peek at the operation here and keep an eye on things.”
Julie spoke up from next to Ben. “What operation?”
“Well… yours.”
They all looked around for a few more seconds until Reggie actually raised his hand, a goofy expression on his face. “So, this would, you know, go a lot quicker if you would just tell us what the hell you’re after. If it’s our hot librarian chick, she’s probably called an Uber and is halfway to Boston by now.”
Derrick nodded. “Right. Sorry, yes, I’m here to observe your operation. I was sent by my boss to look in on things.”
“Your boss wouldn’t happen to be friends with Mr. E, would he?”
“Your boss? No. But through a mutual acquaintance, yes.”
“So Mutual Acquaintance heard from your boss — who heard from Daris — that there was a break-in in her precious museum? And Mutual Acquaintance then passed it on to Mr. E, who’s been trying to start up a ‘Civilian Special Operations’ team to look into these exact sort of things?”
Derrick listened to Reggie’s explanation, nodding along. “Yes, actually. So since this is considered pretty low-level, there isn’t an action team in place. It’s just me.”
“What exactly are you supposed to do, then?” Julie asked.
“Watch, observe, and report back to my superiors whether or not I think this group — your group — is worth investing in.”
“You mean if this group is a threat to national security,” Reggie said.
“Well, that’s part of it, yes. That’s at one end of the spectrum, but ‘giving you a lot of money’ is at the other end.”
“Seems like it’d be a conflict of interest to have the FBI involved with a civilian team that’s also working with the US military,” Joshua said.
“Why?” Derrick asked. “We’re all on the same team.”
“Are we?” Reggie asked.
Derrick’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t get upset. He paused, searching for the right words. Finally, he dropped his head and then brought it up again and met Reggie’s hard gaze. “I’ll be the first to admit that my organization hasn’t always appeared to have the best interests of our nation in mind, but I assure you, I do.”
“You have the nation’s best interests in mind, or just those of your employer?”
“I’m a hard worker, and I do the job right,” Derrick said. “And I’m not going to apologize for that. But I’m an American. I signed up for this job, with you all. I wanted to be here.”
“Why?”
Ben suddenly felt like the conversation had turned into an interrogation that he was on the wrong side of. He held up a hand, timidly at first, then with more conviction. “Wait,” he said. “This guy’s on our team. I believe him, at least for now. But no one’s getting their job done if we’re just standing around in the basement talking. There’s time for that later.”
Reggie nodded. “Yeah,” Reggie said. “He’s right.” He turned to Derrick. “Where to now, then? You have any idea where she went?”
Derrick nodded. “Yeah, I do. New York City.”
“Wait, really? New York?”
Derrick nodded again. “Yep. She’s catching a train in an hour, and then she’s got a date early tomorrow morning, in New York. Times Square.”
“Who’s the date with?” Julie asked.
Derrick took a deep breath. “Patricia Gonzales. She’s scheduled to appear on live television first thing tomorrow morning. Good Morning America.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“HAWK, WE’VE JUST GOT A report,” Morrison said.
They were standing on opposite sides of the large gym, yet The Hawk heard his second-in-command’s voice perfectly, thanks to the wireless communications systems they both wore.
“Tell me,” The Hawk said.
“She’s no longer at the APS, sir,” Morrison said. “Ran out via a basement door, and we don’t have a track on her.”
“Well get a track on her. That should have been done already.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Hawk shook his head, then turned back to the rest of the room. It was a gymnasium, empty in the center except for a single chair. The windows, small rectangular things that hung right at the top edge of the building, had all been blacked out. The two doors into the facility were at opposite sides of the room, one locked and blocked off with a thick braid of chain around the handle. The Hawk stood at this door, the very edge of his own private realm.
He watched as half his team, the three men currently working inside, performed their various duties. Morrison had begun walking to the center of the room to capture the attention of two of the men and give the order to find their employer and place some tracking gear on her person and her vehicle.
The Hawk touched his ear once again and began talking. “Morrison,” he said.
“Sir?” Morrison stopped short near the center of the room.
“What happened? Why did she bail?”
“Unclear sir, but it appears there were others on the premises. She could have been spooked and then left via the trapdoor in the office.”
The Hawk frowned. “Not our men?”
He saw Morrison shake his head even before he heard the answer. “No, sir. Jenkins and Velacruz hadn’t even entered the APS building when they saw her emerge from the basement into the parking lot and then into her vehicle.”
The Hawk s
ucked in a breath. “And why did they not tail her?”
“They did, sir. But they watched the building for another minute to ensure there was no one inside.”
“They cleared?”
Morrison hesitated. “…no, sir. They watched from outside. Then they decided to follow her.”
“But by then it was already too late, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, apparently it was, sir. They said she was headed in the direction of the airport, but they lost her about three blocks from the APS.”
The Hawk nearly cursed, but caught himself. He would have to punish them, but that could wait. Better, he could have Morrison himself do it. He walked over to Morrison, standing next to the chair in the middle of the room, and the two men working.
“Morrison, why was she in a hurry to leave the APS? We had agreed upon a schedule that would allow us the correct amount of time for each party.”
“Yes, sir, we had. We don’t know, sir. Maybe there was someone else involved? A third party?”
“What third party?”
“Maybe that agent that’s been snooping around?”
“She knows about the FBI, Morrison. She wouldn’t have been spooked by them.”
“Him.”
“Excuse me?”
“Him — just one, sir. The FBI doesn’t even have a team on this on. They’ve just sent in one of their agents to scope things out.”
The Hawk frowned. This, too, was new information. The FBI never sent in just one person at a time. Agents worked in pairs sometimes, but more often teams of four, covering a city block or watching a house or tailing a target by ‘leapfrogging’ and following. Two of agents would hang back, providing support and staying out of view as much as possible, while the other two agents would move in.
He’d had a few encounters with FBI-types, and he’d never seen one working alone.
Curious.
He filed the information away, making a mental note to revisit it at a later time, or to let his subconscious work on it until something clicked.
“What else, Morrison?”
“Sir?”
“What else? She knew about the FBI, she knew they were watching her, because I told her that. So she’d have no reason to be spooked by them. What other information do we have on this?”