by Cindy Gerard
“It’s all gone?” B.J.’s heart sank.
“No. I managed to smuggle out a flash drive that I use for backup. I’ve got it with me.”
B.J.’s opinion of Stephanie shot up several more notches.
“What do I do?”
Despite the lingering heat of the hot summer day, goose bumps raced down B.J.’s spine. “Have you talked to anyone else about this?”
“No. Just you. I didn’t say anything to Rhonda. But shouldn’t we… shouldn’t we call someone? Tell them what we think is going on?”
“You let me worry about that. In the meantime, don’t talk to anyone, okay? Not until we put our heads together and sort this out. Where are you now?”
“I’m at a gas station near New Carrolton.”
“Okay, look. You can’t go back to your apartment. I’m in D.C. now. I’ll meet you halfway. Just keep in touch. We’ll figure on a spot as we get closer. Now go. And, Stephanie, watch your back, okay? If you think you’re being followed, call me immediately, got it?”
“Yeah. I’ve got it.”
Stephanie sounded shaky and scared. Smart woman. B.J. disconnected and immediately dialed Dale Sherwood and filled him in.
“Get her under wraps somewhere until we can get this sorted out,” Dale said, sounding worried. “Let me know when she’s off the grid.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And, Chase. I’m sorry. You were right. I should have had you stick with her. I made a bad call.”
Yeah. He had. But so had she when she hadn’t listened to her gut.
“I’ll dig up everything I can about Alan Hendricks and get back to you. In the meantime, watch your six,” Sherwood added, then hung up.
B.J. hit the gas. She flew out of the parking lot and told herself not to borrow trouble, that she’d meet up with Stephanie without incident and get her tucked out of harm’s way until they figured out how to proceed from here.
But her sixth sense told her otherwise. Time was critical. She needed to get to Stephanie and she needed to do it fast.
No matter how hard she tried, Stephanie couldn’t shake the image of a tiny red laser light from a rifle scope centered on the back of her head. Someone was following her. She knew it long before she spotted the black four-door sedan about four vehicles back.
Oh God.
She grabbed the throwaway phone off the seat beside her and dialed B.J. “I think someone is following me.”
7
Raphael Mendoza was a stupid, swaggering sixteen-year-old the day he jacked his first car. It was a Caddy and he was a punk on a dare. The car was hot and fast, but the cops were faster. The only reason he was free to tell the tale was because he’d known the backstreets of Little Havana in Miami as well as he’d known his way around juvenile hall. He was as good as caught, so after a merry chase he’d finally slammed on the brakes, jammed the Caddy into park, and bailed.
Then he’d run like hell and bought himself another reprieve from detention.
He’d grown up a little in the fifteen or so years since then. But he still loved a hot, fast car. As he put pedal to metal and screamed up 295 toward Fort Meade and NSA HQ, he was damn glad for his training days behind the wheel.
He needed to get to Stephanie Tompkins and he needed to get to her now.
“What the hell is holding up that court order?” he grumbled as the speedometer on Gabe’s midnight blue SUV hovered near the 90 mph mark.
Gabe Jones, his Black Ops, Inc. team member, had tossed the keys to Rafe, opting to ride shotgun. “Keep it cool, man,” Jones said as he systematically filled an extra magazine with .45 ACP cartridges for his 1911-A1 pistol. “Ann will call as soon as she has it.”
Cool was a little beyond Rafe at the moment. He would have liked to think they were dealing with a simple case of a mother overreacting with worry about her daughter. But Ann Tompkins didn’t overreact about anything and ever since Ann had called fifteen minutes ago, desperately concerned about Stephanie, all he’d been able to think about was getting a judge to sign the court order authorizing them to tap into the onboard GPS locator in Steph’s car so they could get a fix on her position.
It might not require an act of Congress to accomplish it, but it might just take an act of God to get it done in time to help Steph if she really was in trouble. He kept telling himself this was all precautionary.
Problem was, he had a bad feeling. Judging by the tense look on his face, so did Gabe.
Which brought them back to the court order. It was all about greasing the wheels. But when you had a deputy attorney general wielding the grease gun, those wheels spun fast. Usually.
He swerved around a semi, cut behind a Mini Cooper, and never altered his speed. Beside him, Gabe had started filling the extra magazine for Rafe’s Sig.
Thank God for Gabe. And thank fate that he’d been at Gabe and Jenna’s D.C. apartment instead of working a case out of BOI HQ in Argentina when Ann had called.
“Tell me again exactly what Ann said,” he prodded Gabe, who had taken Ann’s call.
“The short of it is that she’s been concerned about Steph. Something was going on at work that has been eating at her.”
“Ann know what it is?”
“What do you think?”
Right. Ann Tompkins worked in the Justice Department but Stephanie’s NSA position dictated the highest level of secrecy. That trumped the mother card every time.
“Anyway, Ann expected to hear from Steph as soon as she left work tonight. Apparently Ann wanted her to stop at their favorite bakery in D.C. and pick up a few things for the shindig tomorrow night.”
The shindig was the reason Rafe was in the States. He and the bulk of the BOI team—Savage, Colter, Green, and Black—had either already arrived or would be flying in soon because Johnny Reed had bitten the big one. The Texas golden boy was getting married in a couple of months and Ann and Bob Tompkins were throwing the happy couple an engagement party at their Richmond home. Sam Lang and Abbie were coming, too, from Vegas. Rafe had decided to fly in a day early and spend it with Gabe and his wife, Jenna, who was now back at the apartment waiting for a call telling them that this was all a false alarm and that Stephanie was just fine.
“When Steph didn’t call and Ann couldn’t reach her on her cell phone,” Gabe continued, “Ann started calling around to see if anyone knew where Stephanie was. She reached a coworker—Rhonda somebody—and found out the woman had talked to Steph just a few minutes before Ann had tried to reach her. Before they hung up, Rhonda dropped the bomb. She’d just heard a local news bulletin. Their boss, a guy by the name of Alan Hendricks, had been killed. Shot to death. Initial report was that it was a random shooting. When Ann tried to reach Steph again, it went right to voicemail.”
No wonder Ann was frantic. Something at work was bothering Steph. Now a fellow NSA employee—a man who supervised her daughter—turns up dead and Steph wasn’t checking in. Given that the NSA was the spy agency to beat all spy agencies, it stood to reason that something big and bad was going down.
Since D.C. was within thirty minutes of Steph’s apartment if traffic cooperated, that meant that Rafe and Gabe were the closest boots on the ground because the local PD sure wasn’t going to act on a mother’s bad feeling—even if that mother was with the Justice Department.
Gabe’s cell went off. He grabbed it on the first ring.
“Yo. Great. Wait. Let me get a pen.”
He wedged the cell phone between his shoulder and ear, fished a pen out of the glove compartment. “Okay, shoot.”
He repeated a series of numbers and letters and wrote them on his palm. “Got it. We’ll be in touch.”
“Got the court order.” Gabe disconnected, then immediately dialed. When someone picked up, he identified himself, then he fed them an access code to his cell phone. “Stream the info to this number.”
He hung up, stared at the phone, then snapped it open when it rang again.
“We’re in business,” he said as information fr
om Stephanie’s GPS system appeared in his phone. “And there she is. Moving south on Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Looks like we’re within ten minutes of her current position.”
Just as critical as tracking her via GPS was the fact that she was moving. At least her car was. Rafe chose to believe it was because Steph was behind the wheel, which meant she was doing fine.
He hoped.
“Do we know where this Hendricks bought it?”
“Actually, yeah. A gas station near the Route 1 and Cherry Lane intersection. Nowhere near Steph’s current location.”
He wished he could consider that good news. The fact was, if whoever killed Steph’s boss wanted her dead, too, he was most likely mobile. Which meant he had as much chance of reaching Steph as they did.
If he hadn’t already reached her.
Rafe’s gut clenched at the thought. For Ann and Bob’s sake. For his own sake. He’d had sort of a little thing for Stephanie Tompkins since the first time he’d seen her almost ten years ago when he and the men who now made up BOI had first met the Tompkinses. The team members of Task Force Mercy, as tight a fighting unit as the U.S. military had ever seen, had come home to bury their brother in arms, Bryan Tompkins, who had been a tragic casualty of corruption and greed in a foreign land. The team had ended up forging a relationship with the Tompkins family that transcended blood and DNA. Since that day, Rafe had found in the Tompkinses the family he’d lost when he was fifteen.
A lifetime ago.
Yeah. The Tompkinses were family. No way was Rafe letting Ann and Bob lose another child. And no way was he letting anything happen to Stephanie.
He tromped down on the gas pedal, then touched his fingers to the gold crucifix lying against his chest beneath his T-shirt, bucking a horrible feeling that they might arrive too late.
B.J. ran a red light. She cut a sharp left, narrowly missed a cargo van, and punched it. Stephanie wasn’t stupid. If she said she thought she was being followed, B.J. accepted it.
“Random shooting, my ass,” she muttered, thinking of Hendricks as she raced toward Stephanie. They had to get her off the road. One shot and whoever was on her tail could take out a tire and roll the car. That would be it.
Her phone rang again. Stephanie.
“Is he still with you?” B.J. asked, not bothering with hello.
“I… I don’t know. Maybe… or maybe I’m just paranoid. I thought, well, doesn’t matter what I thought. I don’t see anyone now.”
Still, B.J. didn’t want to take any chances. “Here’s what you’re going to do. Do you know where Greenbelt Park is?”
“Yes, it’s just ahead.”
“I’m almost there, too,” B.J. said. “I want you to drive on by it, okay? There’s a rest area just a quarter of a mile past it. Take the exit for the rest area but don’t signal, don’t slow down. Just whip onto the exit and drive right through, then hop the median if you have to but circle back to the Greenbelt turnoff. With luck, if you do have a tail, he’ll either miss you turning off and fly on by or he’ll get caught up in traffic. Either way, it’ll buy a little time.”
“Then what?”
“Then we meet up at the park and haul butt out of there. Tail or no tail, by the time he figures out you doubled back and he finds your car we’ll be long gone in my Jeep.”
Zach Loeffler loved technology. From the time he’d learned the alphabet, he’d been tapping out commands on a computer keyboard. They’d started calling him nerd when he was a skinny, pimple-faced kid in junior high. Jocks like Kevin Nowatny and Cole Landis loved to torment and belittle him. He’d never forgotten. And he’d never forgiven. It had taken twelve years but he’d been patient. He’d tracked them down—Kevin to California and Cole to Arizona. He silenced both of them with one shot from his Steyr. Fairly close range. He’d even let them see his face before he’d killed them.
No point in letting Stephanie Tompkins see him, though. He had no vendetta against her. He just had a job to do. His GPS was locked into her OnStar system, helping him make that happen.
Yeah, he loved technology.
He hung back a good quarter mile, biding his time. Like a cat playing with a mouse.
“What the hell?”
Well now. He hadn’t given her enough credit. The bleep on his GPS showed that she’d pulled a little trick on him.
“Doubled back, did you, sweetheart?”
Fine. Let her run. He wasn’t going to lose her. He drove on to the next exit, then headed back the way he’d come.
“Where are you going, Miss Tompkins?” he wondered aloud, then decided he had it figured out. “Nice evening for a late picnic?”
She was heading back to Greenbelt Park. He liked it. Maybe she’d lead him on a little chase. Hunter and prey. He’d read a book once about a guy who captured women, turned them loose in a forest, then tracked them like vermin and killed them. He’d never been into recreational shooting, never understood the sporting mentality. Maybe, after today, he would.
He checked the GPS again. Checked his watch. And stepped on it. This day just kept getting better and better.
B.J. tore down the approach road to the park entrance. She knew the thousand-acre park well, had hiked the lush forest of oak, hickory, and beech many times in the past three years. That’s why she’d thought of it as a meeting site. It was her getaway spot. While she’d never admit to anyone that she had a nature girl side, she loved the idea of catching a white-tailed deer by surprise. She also enjoyed listening to the birds and watching the sun flicker through the poplars.
She wasn’t going to be doing any bird-watching now, she thought as she skidded to a stop in front of a guardrail made of thick wooden posts and reinforced steel bars.
The guardhouse was empty. She should have known it would be this close to dusk. She’d been hoping a ranger would be on duty. He’d have been another gun if they ran into trouble.
As it was, there were only a handful of other cars parked at the far end of the lot and their owners were nowhere to be seen. More important, there was no Stephanie.
Just in case, she reached into the glove box for her Glock and her extra clip. She figured they had about another half hour of daylight. She wanted to be long gone before dark.
She checked the magazine, slipped it home, then chambered a round just as she heard a car approach on the road behind her. She stepped out of the Jeep, using it for cover just in case, as a white Saturn roared into the parking lot and jerked to a stop on the passenger side of her Jeep.
Stephanie jumped out of the car.
“Let’s get out of here,” B.J. said, shielding her eyes against the glare of the low-hanging sun. That’s when she spotted a black four-door sedan cruising down the road.
“Change of plans,” she said when the vehicle turned into the park driveway.
Stephanie followed B.J.’s gaze to where the black car rolled toward them, closing fast. “Oh, God. That’s the car. That’s the car I thought was following me. How did he find me so fast?”
“Too late to worry about that now. Get in my Jeep. And get down on the floor,” B.J. ordered as the sedan slowed to a crawl before finally stopping at the entrance to the parking lot about twenty yards away, effectively blocking them in.
Stephanie wasn’t stupid. She jerked the passenger-side door open and clambered inside.
They were pinned down. Even if B.J. wanted to make a run for it, she’d have to head straight into his line of fire.
“What’s he doing?” Stephanie kneeled in the front seat.
“Waiting. Now get down,” B.J. ordered again.
“What can I do to help?” Stephanie’s eyes were wide and round.
“Unless you’ve got a submachine gun tucked under your shirt, not a damn thing. Just get down.”
Stephanie immediately dropped down on the floor between the dash and the front seat.
B.J. kept her stance beside her Jeep, using it as a shield and the roof to steady her hands as she aimed the Glock at the sedan’s driv
er’s-side door.
Then she waited.
Heart hammering.
Hands sweating but steady, she sighted down the barrel of the Glock.
She couldn’t see the driver. The windows were tinted black, which would have told her they had trouble even if this joker hadn’t followed Stephanie on the heels of Alan Hendricks’s shooting.
She had no idea what kind of firepower she was up against but she didn’t want to risk driving headlong into a blast from an assault rifle, and she had to figure that was the least of his weaponry. Just like she was betting all of her marbles that he did have weapons. If he was here as a friendly, he’d have shown himself by now. That left only one option. He wanted to hurt them. Her, because she was in his way; Stephanie, because she was the target.