Harvey Bennett Mysteries: Books 4-6

by Nick Thacker

  Their technology was better than Lewis’ had been, Ben knew, but that meant nothing. Even for an accomplished navigator like Lewis, a small error on his end could mean Ben’s group, 200 years later, would be using pinpoint-accurate technology to look entirely in the wrong spot.

  It was a gut-check moment for Ben. He knew they’d need luck, timing, and a lot of looking in the right place at the right time. They hadn’t even decided if they were looking for a cave, as the clue had initially led them to believe, or something else entirely.

  Was the ‘cave’ referenced in the clue an actual cavern, or was it a metaphor for something else?

  They were looking for a needle in a haystack, but the haystack was the size of a country.

  Ben flicked his head back to stare at the phone in Reggie’s lap as his friend responded.

  “Where the hell is Julie?”

  “She’s right here next to me. And she’s been telling me all about your little group for the past ten minutes. She’ll be unwilling to talk in a minute or so, so I was hoping you would be willing to tell me a little more.”

  Ben seethed, his fists clenching. He couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Listen, you little prick,” he said, nearly shouting. “You lay a finger on her and — you know what? Screw that. You’re already dead.”

  The deep voice laughed. “I’m glad you’re concerned, Harvey. It means you care. Julie was speaking your praises a moment ago, and you’ll be satisfied to hear that she has nothing but wonderful things to say about you.”

  Ben closed his eyes, forcing himself to breathe. Derrick was turned almost all the way around in the front seat, his left hand around the other side of the headrest and on Ben’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Anyway, back to the point: Julie was willing — with some urging on our part — to reveal everything she knew about your little band of warriors. The ‘CSO?’ That’s a wonderful idea!” Garza laughed, louder this time, then came back on the phone. “She told me about your romp through Antartica not too long ago, and she told us all about your reclusive benefactor. ‘Mr. E?’ That’s really his name? And you don’t know anything else about him?”

  “Why is she telling you all of this?” Reggie snapped. “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing, really. At least nothing that won’t wear off soon. She’ll be tired, but unaffected. I wanted to test the serum my benefactor has been playing with. There are sometimes a few side effects… of the permanent sort, if the dosage is high enough. But Julie had just enough of it to be willing to cooperate, and no more.”

  Ben felt like he was going to lose his mind. He suddenly felt claustrophobic. He wanted to tell Joshua to pull over, to just stop the car and let him out. His fists were white now, yet he still clenched them, opening and closing them over and over again, tighter each time.

  “Let me be frank for a moment, Gareth. And the rest of you. My employer is very interested in wrapping up this little adventure as quickly as possible. In order to speed things along, I’ve sent a few of my recruits your way. They will be meeting up with you in a few minutes, actually. I believe you’ve already met, back in Philadelphia.

  “You will cooperate, or you will die. If you give them any grief whatsoever, Ms. Richardson dies. Do I make myself clear?”

  Ben stared straight ahead in the seat. His back was straight, his legs were rigid. He wanted to scream, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to even open his mouth to speak.

  From somewhere behind the man on the other end of the phone, a woman’s voice suddenly yelled.

  Julie.

  “ — we’re here, in Philly. In a gym right across from the Ritten —”

  Julie’s voice was cut off, and there was a smacking sound and a small yelp.

  Ben tensed up even more and he shot his hand out to the side, crushing it against the window. The loud sound made Reggie jump, but Ben’s outburst had no effect on The Hawk. With the same calm, practiced voice, he returned to the phone.

  “I hope that proves my seriousness in this matter, Harvey. You have a lot at stake here, son. I hope you won’t disappoint me.”

  “I’ll kill you, you son of a —”

  “Do I make myself clear?” The Hawk asked again.

  Reggie’s characteristic smile had faded. He took in a breath, slowly. “Clear, Garza. Clear as glass.”

  The Hawk hung up, and the phone screen went to black.

  Chapter SIXTY-ONE

  “HE’S OUT THERE,” BEN SAID, nearly shouting. “He’s out there, in Philadelphia, right where we were.”

  “We don’t know that, Ben,” Derrick said. “Garza said she was drugged, that he gave her some sort of serum.”

  “She’s there,” Ben said. “I know she’s there.”

  “What if she is, Ben?” Reggie asked. “I want to find her as much as you do, but we can’t just turn around —”

  “We can, and we will. Right now.”

  “Ben, we can’t —”

  “Turn around, Joshua,” Ben said. He pulled up against his seatbelt, as if trying to stand. He would tear the thing off its bolts if he had to.

  Joshua was still driving, now ascending around another curve in the road. “Ben, I’m sorry, we…”

  Ben’s nostrils flared. He pulled the seatbelt, fighting against the constraint. “I’m going back.”

  “No, Ben.”

  “I am. Try to stop me.” Ben flicked the lock on his door and then unbuckled his seatbelt.

  “Ben! Stop!” Derrick’s voice said. “I agree with you.”

  Ben was about to push the door open and slide out — he had no idea what he’d do after that, but he didn’t care about after that. He cared about Julie, and he now knew where she was.

  She wouldn’t lie to him. She may have been lied to, but as far as she knew, she was being held in Philadelphia, near the Rittenhouse.

  In a gym.

  It was an odd thing to say, which was why it had stuck in Ben’s mind. If she’d have said ‘room,’ or ‘building,’ it wouldn’t have been helpful — there were thousands of those near the hotel in Philadelphia.

  But she’d said ‘gym.’ Loudly and clearly, just before she’d been struck by one of The Hawk’s men. Or The Hawk himself.

  Ben looked at Derrick.

  “I agree with you, Ben,” he said again. “I think she’s in Philadelphia, and I think it makes sense to go find her. You find her, you find the men doing this.”

  “Alone?” Reggie asked.

  “No, one of us goes with. We split up, two of us staying here, trying to piece together the next clue, and two of us going back to Philly. It’ll take hours to get there, but it could take us just as long here to find the treasure.

  For the first time since he’d gotten in the car, Ben felt his mind sliding back to a normal ease. He wasn’t ‘fine’ — far from it — but he was better. He could think clearly.

  This works, he thought. Two of us go back to Philly, two of us stay here to find the treasure.

  “What about Garza’s goons?” Reggie asked. “He said they’re ‘going to meet up with us,’ remember?”

  “They’re coming either way,” Derrick said. “And Garza’s got Julie either way.”

  “He’ll know we’re coming for her.”

  “He already does. He probably started planning for it immediately after he hung up the phone. Julie took a risk blurting that out — however she knew about it — but it’s helpful information, and he knows that. He’ll be ready.”

  Joshua nodded along. “He’s right. It doesn’t change our situation, really. We just got lucky, thanks to Julie, and we need to capitalize on it.”

  Reggie seemed to be the only one not on board, but he nodded anyway. “I don’t like it — it weakens us significantly. But if we play our cards right we can trade them in for a better hand. This way we have two routes to do that — find the treasure before Daris gets it, or find Julie before…”

  “Right,” Ben said. “And
I’m going to find Julie before that.”

  “Who’s going with him, then?” Joshua asked. “Derrick needs to be here, since it’s over if The Hawk gets his hands on him. An FBI agent with the journal in his possession is all he needs. And I’m assuming you’re not ready to trust us with that book, yet?”

  Derrick shook his head. “It’s not about trust. I’m staying here in Montana, until I find it.”

  “So that leaves me or Reggie,” Joshua said. “Honestly, I can’t justify sending Reggie back — we need him here, to fend off whatever it is Garza’s throwing our way. And his knowledge of history could prove more helpful out here.”

  “So it’s me and you, pal,” Ben said, directing the statement to Joshua. “Let’s make a plan when we get to this town.”

  “You got it, buddy. We’ll get her back. I promise.”

  Chapter SIXTY-TWO

  REGGIE DIDN’T LIKE LEAVING BEN to fend for himself, even though Joshua was there. Joshua Jefferson was a good man, and a capable leader, but he didn’t have the friendship with Ben that Reggie had. Reggie had a way of getting through to Ben when no one else — not even Julie — could.

  They had a camaraderie, an understanding, a brotherhood that could only be forged in battle. Joshua was a bit more closed off, more personal, so he’d always been just a bit distant from them. Through their shared love of bourbon and their forced partnership in rough situations, Reggie and Ben had become fast friends.

  So it had hurt a bit when Ben and Joshua left for Philadelphia, but he knew it was the wise decision. Roger Derrick was every bit as capable a fighter as Ben would have been, and right now Reggie needed fighters.

  He could use a few more, but if they had two — armed with 9mm handguns only — that would have to do.

  Derrick was driving now, and they were heading straight up a dirt-paved backroad that led into a mountainous valley. The scenery was breathtakingly beautiful, but Reggie was feeling far from romantic considering their situation and his current partner.

  They had spoken little, and even then only to share ideas about which direction to move, and when they thought they’d run into the Ravenshadow men once again. After dropping Ben and Joshua off at the town’s only car rental facility, they’d booked it farther into the hills, trying to get to the square Joshua had outlined on his phone’s map.

  Ben and Joshua would ride as fast as possible back to Browning, and then to the airport to catch a commercial flight to Philadelphia. They’d anticipated the entire trip taking three hours if they were lucky, so Reggie and Derrick’s job was to keep the Ravenshadow boys busy for that amount of time, until they could coordinate attacks on both sides.

  Plans, Reggie knew, were malleable. They changed, often rapidly, and often without the planner’s consent. He hoped they would be somewhere in the vicinity of what they’d planned, but he knew it was wishful thinking for their plan to be executed flawlessly.

  Derrick knew it too, and he was sure Joshua and Ben did as well. But there was no better plan. Mr. E’s wife couldn’t meet up with them until at least the next day, and they were running out of daylight hours in this day already.

  Unlike Vicente Garza, Reggie didn’t have a team of recruits he could simple call into action, anywhere in the country. It was one of the enigmatic characteristics of the man; his charisma and inspirational leadership was large enough that it persuaded glory-seeking young men to join up, ready to do the man’s bidding.

  Further, Derrick had informed Reggie that the FBI was unable to send support, either. They’d told Derrick that they understood the situation — they didn’t — and that they were watching in on them — they weren’t. Derrick explained that since this wasn’t a ‘sanctioned’ mission — he had just been tasked with observing and recording Daris’ actions — it would take too much bureaucracy and red tape to get things moving in time. Derrick’s take on his conversation with his boss was, as he’d told Reggie, a ‘typical FBI balking maneuver.’ They might recognize that there was danger ahead, but they weren’t interested in committing too quickly.

  Still, he assured Reggie that the FBI was mobilizing, albeit slowly. They hadn’t been prepared for Daris’ case to explode like this, and they’d thought Roger Derrick’s warnings misguided at best. As much as he’d fought them on it, they would only appropriate more funding if he could prove — in a report — that it was necessary. Derrick suspected whatever would happen would be all over by the time any more of his coworkers got to the party.

  Reggie had asked what the policy was on reporting active-shooter situations, and Derrick laughed. He’d told Reggie that they were certainly on alert, but there was no plan in place to handle this specific situation at the moment. They would send a team out to help only if they could find men and women to pull off of other task forces, and that was a long shot at this point.

  It didn’t sit well with Reggie, knowing that a major acronym organization in his home country, ostensibly created to serve that country, had a hard time sending in backup to one of their own without his ‘filing a report.’

  But that was their situation, and Reggie needed to be prepared for fighting an army with only two men. He’d done it before, and he had a feeling he’d do it again today.

  He made a mental note to ‘file his own report’ when they returned, demanding that Mr. E not send them out on any more ‘discovery missions’ without being fully armed and prepared for a battle.

  The dirt road ended at a small parking lot, and a wooden sign nearby told Reggie that they were heading into an area of the Lewis and Clark National Forest. Theirs was the only car in the lot.

  “That’s a good sign,” Reggie muttered. They got out of the car and collected their gear — armed 9mm handguns, two each, and enough ammunition to hopefully get them through the next few hours. Derrick also grabbed a pack that he’d stuffed into the trunk. A ‘BOB,’ or ‘Bug-Out Bag,’ a pre-packed bag full of survival gear that was meant for ‘bugging out’ when things hit the fan. Reggie used to sell them at his survival camp in Brazil, and he still maintained a few bags of differing sizes.

  He’d been impressed to see Derrick grab it from the safe house, and he’d been dying to pop it open and lust over the contents. As a self-described ‘survivalist,’ camping and survival gear were like toys to him. He could spend hours in an Army surplus store, even though he often knew more about each item than the proprietor, and most of the gear sold there was so used it was bordering on useless.

  “This whole area is National Forest,” Derrick said. “Including Glacier National Park. Altogether, there’s about 2,000 square miles of open wilderness to explore. So not seeing another person out here probably just means we’re looking in the wrong spot.”

  “Well let’s start at the beginning, with the first clue. We found this area Joshua mapped for us, and we’re guessing that’s the correct quadrant to look in because it’s about 23 miles away from where we were, back at Camp Disappointment?”

  “Right,” Derrick said. “So we’re probably close to this ‘Cave of Shadows,’ but that’s not going to make it easy to find.”

  “Well, Garza’s team is heading out here too, apparently, though I’m not sure where they are. But listening to Garza talk about it, it sort of seems like they knew right where to go.”

  “They could be tracking us,” Derrick said.

  “How?” Reggie replied. “I know as well as you do they don’t have the tech network for that. And any on-person devices we would have… well, would we have seen them yet?”

  Reggie felt a moment of unease pass over him. What if they had planted a small tracking device on one of them?

  Derrick shook his head. “No, they didn’t. We passed through a TSA-quality security checkpoint at the airport, and they would have pulled me aside and told me about it.”

  “Or maybe they wouldn’t have, because it’s TSA-quality.”

  “Their scanning system’s better than you think,” Derrick said.

  “My bar’s pretty low for th
ose guys, so ‘better than I think’ just means you’re telling me the scanning system’s’ better than walking between two pieces of aluminum foil.”

  “Yeah,” Derrick said. “It’s definitely better than you think.”

  Even though they’d headed straight through the airport to the runway, they’d gone through a security fast-lane, as it happened to be the quickest route through the airport. Reggie wasn’t surprised to hear Derrick tell him the airport would have caught anything like a tracking device on their clothing, but he wouldn’t have been surprised either if TSA had simply let them through without even asking about it.

  He checked his pockets and the folds of his pants. Nothing. He was clean.

  “So how’d they find us?” he asked.

  “Maybe they didn’t,” Derrick said.

  “Explain.”

  “Well, they’ve got a copy of the journal, right? Daris has people working on cracking the same codes we are, so maybe she’s already figured out the second clue, as well.”

  “And The Hawk assumes we’re close to figuring it out, too.”

  “Which means he’s waiting for us to find him. Or his men, at least.”

  “Exactly. And he’s got Julie, so he knows we’re not stopping to regroup or abandon the mission.”

  “He’s set up a trap that we’re supposed to walk into. Knowingly.” Reggie shook his head. “That does sound like the man I used to know.”

  Derrick looked at him as they walked. “Yeah, tell me more about that. How’d you meet?”

  “Training camp, back in the day. I was hot for some action, and as a hotshot sniper I thought I’d make it known that he needed me for this new security team he was starting up.”

  “He was active duty?”

  “We overlapped for just a few months, so he was already on his way out then, but yeah. Served in Storm and Shield, I think, and probably a few black ops missions as well. Guy seems made for black-level leadership.”

  “Why do you say that?”