Phantom Instinct (9780698157132)

by Gardiner, Meg

  Sorenstam saw it differently. Travis Maddox had used his position with Spartan Security to set Harper up to take a fall for the attack on Xenon. He was setting her up right now. He had Piper, and he wanted Oscar. But he wanted Harper most of all.

  “Tom White—Travis Maddox—isn’t just out here for kicks. He has access to Spartan Security’s assets. He has all kinds of resources at his disposal.”

  “You think . . .”

  “Assume he’s going to employ those resources to ambush Aiden and Harper.” She held tight to the wheel as the big car gained momentum on the downhill.

  Abruptly, her phone pinged. Oscar said, “It’s a text from Aiden. Coordinates.”

  “Call him back. Hurry.”

  Oscar pressed REDIAL but immediately lowered the phone. “Nada. Not enough signal for a voice call.” He thumbed the controls and sent a text, and then threw up his hand. “It failed.”

  “Keep trying. Just keep trying. Unless we can contact them, Harper and Aiden are driving into an ambush blind.”

  She felt the pang again, and the anger. That man—a good man torn up from within, unable to see the world clearly. It was not his fault, but the cracks in his perception seemed to prevent him from seeing her heart. His pain, his explosiveness—those things she could have dealt with, if she’d had any hope that he was going to recover, and to become again the person he had been before the injury. She hardened herself to deal with him dispassionately tonight.

  She knew she’d lost him for good. She saw the look on Aiden’s face when he was near Harper, saw how he moved when he was near her, protective and full of badly disguised want. She saw the look in Harper’s eyes, too, desire and nerves and hesitation—as though she were about to walk across the Grand Canyon on a high wire, and knew it would be exciting and beautiful but suspected that the wire was frayed and the bolts holding it to the ground might give way. Harper, she thought, was at the start of a crossing she herself had only recently completed.

  And they were all headed toward catastrophe. She drove.

  The clock on the dashboard read ten to midnight. Harper stared at it, as though she could will it to stop advancing. They’d crossed into Kern County a while back. Miles behind them, the scattered lights of the town of Mojave shivered on the desert floor. Ahead, the countryside was completely dark. The highway had narrowed to two lanes. There was nothing out this far but auto wrecking yards and chemical plants and the detritus of industries that had shriveled and died in the desert heat. She downshifted, watching for the turnoff. They were in the middle of nowhere, but a particular part of nowhere that she remembered with granular clarity.

  Even under the moonlight, she recognized the landscape, even ten years after she’d run from this part of the state. Ahead rose a ridge of mountains that looked as sharp as a hatchet blade and heated red in the sunlight. Beyond the headlights, not far away, was the spot where her mother had fallen asleep at the wheel, with a fifth of Maker’s Mark beneath the driver’s seat, and drove a car packed with weed into a ditch.

  “It’s probably two miles farther,” she said.

  “Travis is playing an elaborate game,” Aiden said. “One that’s extremely cold.”

  “More than just a game.”

  Travis had directed her to turn off the highway onto a private access road that headed toward the knife ridge of mountains. He was sending her to the abandoned factory where her mother hid after the wreck.

  “The factory,” she said. “Rowdy Maddox used it for stashing stolen property.”

  “So Travis knows the layout.”

  “Inside and out. Rowdy used one of the security guards who patrolled the property after the factory shut down. Paid him off to get inside the gates.” She leaned forward, scanning the road. “Soon.”

  A minute later, the headlights caught the turnoff. She swung the car onto the access road.

  “Shut off the headlights?” Aiden said.

  “Yeah. Let’s not let him spot us until we’re ready for him to know we’re there.”

  She flipped the switch and downshifted, engine braking, slowing below twenty mph. After a second, her eyes adjusted and she began to see the road again. Under a crust of moonlight, the car rose along the rough pavement, through sage and yucca, gradually heading uphill. She steered into a long curve, over a rise, and the last trembling lights of Mojave disappeared behind it.

  Aiden pulled his phone from his pocket. “Still no signal.”

  “So whose phone did you have me chuck into the brush back there?” she said.

  “Throw-down,” he said.

  She almost laughed then. She put a hand on the gearshift. He set his hand over hers for a moment. It calmed her. Just enough.

  Which was good, because they crested another rise and saw the factory complex in the distance. A chain-link fence glinted dully in the moonlight.

  The phone in Harper’s hand rang.

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  Harper lifted her latest phone, the one Travis had planted by the wrecked big rig. Something warned her to hold her cards close to the vest. Instead of saying, We’re here, she said, “We’re close. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  And she heard another sound—a buzz. It was Aiden’s phone.

  Travis said, “Take the road to the main entrance. Drive through the gate.”

  Aiden’s phone continued buzzing. Travis wasn’t supposed to know that either of them had another phone. Travis wasn’t supposed to know that the man in the car with her was Aiden. Harper stared at him wide-eyed as he reached into his back pocket and silenced it.

  “We’re coming,” she said.

  She crawled along the road. The factory was still at least a mile away.

  “We do this outside the gate,” she said.

  “You have no say. Drive.”

  She hung up. “He wants us inside.”

  “That means he traps us.” He cut a glance at her.

  She kept going. Slowly.

  “You actually planning to go in the front entrance?” he said.

  Her nerves began to sing. “Maybe. But Sorenstam doesn’t have to. There’s a fire road that cuts through the hills behind the complex.” She ran a hand through her hair. “If we can reach her. I wish we knew where she was.”

  “She’s coming. Believe,” he said.

  He got out his phone and sent her a text.

  When Sorenstam crossed the county line, she knew definitely she was outside the fence. Out of Los Angeles County, directly disobeying an order from her commander, she was out of her jurisdiction, without the official sanction she’d had a hundred yards back. She wondered, briefly, if this might work to her advantage.

  “Tell me when you get a signal,” she said to Oscar.

  He shook his head and snapped his fingers. “Comes and goes like that.”

  The road was narrow and winding, through towering hills. The last text she’d received from Aiden said, Back road. Don’t come in the front. Take the fire road. Oscar was sitting with a map on his lap, shining a flashlight on it. She felt increasingly alone, and increasingly outgunned. She picked up the radio and scanned frequencies, searching for the Kern County Sheriff.

  They didn’t know she’d been told to stand down. They didn’t know she was acting against orders. She punched the scanner, getting little but static.

  All at once, the radio squealed and a voice broke through the static. She locked the frequency and pressed the TRANSMIT button.

  “Kern County Sheriff, come in,” she said.

  The static returned and the voices disappeared. She braked hard, put the car in reverse, and backed up.

  Oscar said, “Excuse me?”

  She swerved backward up the road until the static eased. “Need backup,” she said. “These guys might be it.”

  As the unmarked car reversed around a bend, the voices crept back. She stopped
and again said, “Kern County, come in.”

  The voice that replied was faint. “This is Kern County dispatch. Identify yourself.”

  “Detective Erika Sorenstam, LASD.”

  She gave them her badge number. She felt a tigerish energy ripple through her.

  “I need backup,” she said.

  Quickly, she told the dispatcher she was investigating a possible abduction. She explained that she’d come to Kern County to check on a possible runaway, a case that now seemed to be more sinister. They wanted to know why they weren’t contacted first—why the odd approach?

  “The girl is the daughter of a departmental friend,” she said. “It’s personal for us.”

  “What do you need, Detective?”

  “A patrol unit to meet me at these coordinates,” she said, and rattled off the address Aiden had texted.

  She waited for their response. She knew that once they verified her identity, their next step would be to call her superiors, who would pitch a fit and tell them to forget it, probably before deciding to fire her.

  “Detective Sorenstam, roger, we will dispatch a unit to meet you at the address,” the dispatcher said. “Be advised the nearest unit is currently forty miles away, and responding to another call.”

  Forty miles? She muttered, “Christ.”

  Oscar said, “Welcome to the desert.”

  The dispatcher said, “Advise when you reach the address.”

  She peered around at the rugged hills. She didn’t like her chances of getting radio or phone reception on the fire road behind the factory. “Will do.”

  She replaced the radio in its cradle and put the car in gear. “Buckle up, kid.”

  Two minutes later, Sorenstam found the fire road. A mile along it, she pulled into a protected hollow, where the car would be invisible from the factory. She turned it around and parked facing back down the road.

  “Have a feeling that when we leave, we may be heading that way at high speed,” she said.

  Oscar said, “What are you expecting?”

  “Don’t know if we’ll leave here in pursuit.”

  “Or running.”

  Neither the radio nor their phones had been able to contact the Kern County Sheriff again. She trusted that deputies were responding, but she couldn’t wait for them to arrive.

  She got out and took the Remington shotgun from the trunk. She opened a box of shells and loaded the magazine. She put more shells in the pocket of her fleece and zipped it. Oscar was staring.

  “I don’t plan to run,” she said.

  “You don’t know what these guys are capable of. You’d better be sure of that.”

  She paused, cold in the night. His words sent a deeper chill through her. She answered by racking a shell into the chamber. The noise cracked and Oscar inhaled.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

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  Sorenstam stuck to the walls of the ravine, trying to glimpse the factory complex while staying below the line of sight. She told Oscar to keep low.

  “Don’t present a silhouette on the ridge,” she said.

  “It’s dark.”

  “The moon is up. A moving human form will be identifiable.” She sidestepped when the slope steepened. “For all we know, they have night-vision capability. You’d stand out from the background like an electric green frog.”

  She knew that Aiden and Harper were on the approach road to the complex, probably a mile and a half downhill to the southeast. From here she could see no lights from Harper’s car. She tried again to call, without success. Even if she could see the car, that didn’t mean she could call them—her phone needed to connect with a cell tower, and she had no idea where the nearest one was. Her portable police radio would connect with anybody on the frequency, but only if they were in range. And within line of sight. They had come to the empty quarter. California raw and unvarnished and wild.

  She crouched low, set the shotgun across her thighs, and opened her fleece. She tucked her phone inside the folds of the jacket and typed.

  Oscar said, “What’s that all about?”

  She continued to type. “For a tech guy and a career criminal, I’m surprised you need an explanation. It’s dark and what’s the brightest light for miles around?”

  “Oh.”

  She was hiding the display so its light wouldn’t be seen down below and give them away, working into position on the uphill side of the plant.

  APPROACHING FROM HILL TO WEST. WILL HOLD POSITION 100 YARDS OUTSIDE FENCE. DID YOU GET EARLIER MESSAGE?

  She pushed SEND and stood up.

  Oscar said, “I’m not a career criminal. That hurts my feelings.”

  She continued down the hill. “Then prove it. Come on.”

  Aiden’s phone vibrated. He said, “Text from Erika.”

  He read it aloud, staring at the screen. “What earlier message?”

  Harper slowed the car to a near crawl. When they went through a dip, she turned the headlights on again. They were close enough to the plant that the engine noise might be audible. Leaving the lights off would only give Travis cause to get twitchy.

  Aiden stared at the darkened road, pensive. “We should split up before we get to the gate, to prevent us both being ambushed. One of us gets out at the next bend. The other drives up to the gate, parks the car, and ducks out the back, to let Travis think we’re still in it.”

  “And go cross-country to meet Sorenstam on the hill?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  She was quiet. Her eyes shifted back and forth. “You get out. I’ll drive to the gate.”

  “Roger that,” he said.

  “I’m going to park half a mile outside the gate and leave it running with the lights on. You recon and I’ll meet you.” She saw him about to question her and brooked no dissent. “Travis will have to deal with me on my terms. You’re right—if I drive through the gate, I won’t come out alive. So we have to find Erika and go in the back together. We have to find Piper in there. Otherwise, it’s . . .”

  She stopped, unable to bring herself to utter the words. She knew there was no such thing as spell-casting or talismanic protection, but she couldn’t bring herself to say They’ll kill her, not within sight of the place Piper was being held.

  “It’s a risk,” Aiden said.

  “Motion sensors, night vision, yada yada. You run. I’ll be a minute behind you.”

  After a moment, he nodded. “We only have a couple of minutes. Once I find a place where the line of sight to the factory is broken, I’m going to jump out. I mean jump, too. Get going before they can notice that the car has stopped. We can’t let them think anything hinky is happening.”

  “Agreed.” She downshifted into second and slowed to ten mph.

  “I need you to tell me every scrap of information about the complex you can remember. Perimeter security. The layout of the buildings. Access, egress, blind spots.”

  “The complex had a cyclone fence surrounding it. Six feet, no barbed wire. Don’t know if it’s been upgraded.”

  “I can climb a six-foot fence.”

  She stayed quiet. He read her thoughts.

  “If my leg holds,” he said, “and even if it doesn’t, I’ll make it over. But I don’t expect any of the doors to the factory to be unlocked.”

  “I was only in there a couple of times,” she said, “and it’s a big shambling place.”

  She tried to remember it. What came back was the dim and dingy light, the smell of dust and grease, the scale of the place.

  “It’s a multibuilding complex. Factory and warehouse. The factory is as big as a football field. It has a main factory floor and two basement levels. Underground, it’s got long corridors where trucks and forklifts could drive to load and unload components,” she said. “Belowground, it’s concrete construction and highly compartmentaliz
ed. It’s a maze. Multiple staircases, plus ladders between floors in a few access tunnels.”

  “Access tunnels—any that run beneath the perimeter fence and come up outside it?”

  “A couple.”

  She thought of the rat run—a narrow series of tunnels that ran between walls and above the lowest basement ceiling, before burrowing beneath the fence to a transformer building.

  “But I only crawled through the tunnels one time, with Oscar, when we were kids. There’s no way I could find the entrance point outside the fence tonight in the dark. Sorry.”

  They could see the outline of the complex in the distance, a boxy set of buildings inside the dull shine of the fence. Harper inched along the road, waiting until they could get out of sight in a dip or behind an outcropping of rock.

  Aiden said, “When we go in, we’ll try for a door along the back side.”

  “If it’s locked? Don’t break a window. They’ll hear.”

  “You don’t have a set of lock picking tools, do you?” he said. “Bolt cutters? Glass cutter?”

  She shot him a cool glance. “No. Don’t, won’t, not ever.” At least, not ever again.

  Aiden nodded, slowly. “Good thing I do.”

  The road began a brief downhill and rounded a bend where it dipped behind a ledge of rock. The headlights hit the middle of the uphill but didn’t reach the top.

  “Ready,” he said. “Do this quick.”

  Harper downshifted sharply, sending both of them lurching against the seat belts. At the bottom of the dip, she nearly skidded to a stop and yanked the parking break. Aiden jumped out. He ran around the back of the MINI to the driver’s side. She lowered the window.

  He grabbed the window frame and bent down. “What did they make at this factory?”

  She put the car in gear. “Rocket fuel.”

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