High Heat

by Richard Castle

  The drivers were already gingerly climbing out of their cars and trucks to begin the process of assessing damage and assigning blame.

  “Two SUVs,” Heat blurted as she reached the intersection. It was all she could get out before she had to gasp for air.

  “Yeah! I know!” the driver of a Ford Edge with a crumpled front end answered. “They ran the frickin’ light like it wasn’t even there, the bastards! I was just—”

  “Which way?” Heat said with her next breath.

  The driver jerked his thumb toward the 79th Street Transverse, which fed into the other side of the intersection—really, operating as a continuance of 81st Street, even though the street name changed.

  It fed directly into Central Park. And it didn’t have stoplights. It was just a long curved road with nothing to slow down a fleeing SUV, especially one that surely wouldn’t mind swerving around slower cars or playing chicken with oncoming traffic.

  Heat ran to the opposite side of the intersection, to where she had a view of where the transverse bent around and out of sight. There was no traffic going down it, of course. None had been able to get through the accident-clogged intersection.

  Finally, Heat came to her senses and slowed. She bent forward, clutching her pants just above the knees, sucking in oxygen as fast as her lungs would allow.

  There was no chance she was going to catch up. She brought her phone to her mouth and, in a series of short bursts, informed dispatch the SUVs were last seen heading east on the 79th Street Transverse.

  She would have to rely on some of the other thirty-five thousand sworn officers of the New York Police Department to do the job she couldn’t. And there was no question in her mind they would.

  They would get Rook and Aguinaldo back, safe and in one piece.

  SUVs didn’t just disappear.

  “What the fuck do you mean they just disappeared?” The Hammer yelled, and not for the first time.

  It was an hour later. An hour during which the combined human and technological resources of the New York Police Department had not yielded one single clue as to where Rook and Aguinaldo had been taken.

  It was time to regroup. But first there had to be recriminations. Zach Hamner had been dispatched from One Police Plaza to the Twentieth Precinct. Officially, he was providing “administrative support” to the search for a kidnapped NYPD detective and a high-profile member of the media.

  Unofficially, he was there to ream everyone new assholes.

  “That’s not possible,” Hamner continued. “Rabbits disappear from magicians’ hats after they say abracadabra. Stains disappear from peoples’ clothing after they harness the power of Tide. Enormous black SUVs do not…just…disappear.”

  “Sir, we had boots on the ground within two minutes of when the first shots were fired,” the desk sergeant said. “We had foot patrols in the area alerted even before that. We had every unit in the precinct on high alert and ready to respond. We had Police Two in the air and overhead within seven minutes…”

  “And you had King Kong and Santa Claus manning sniper positions on the roof. I get all that. And I don’t care. What I want to understand better—so I can explain it to the commissioner, so he can explain it to the mayor—is how the fuck four armed thugs kidnapped a police detective and a prominent journalist in broad fucking daylight when they were fifty fucking feet from the front door of a precinct. Can we run through that one more time? Because I’m still a little fuzzy on how the fuck that happens, and then even more fuzzy on how the fuck they vanish like a popcorn fart in a fifty-acre field.”

  They were in the detective bull pen: the detectives, the lieutenant who headed the patrol unit, the desk sergeant, and a few other uniformed officers who were deemed to have been vaguely responsible.

  Heat was off to the side. Even The Hammer had the sensitivity to realize that someone whose husband had just been kidnapped—and who had risked her life trying to stop it—perhaps didn’t need the pallid vampire face of the deputy commissioner of legal matters spewing spittle and profanity on her.

  She was gazing ahead and down. Had anyone drawn a straight line from her eyes to where she seemed to be looking, it would appear she was staring at the side of a detective’s desk. Really, she wasn’t seeing anything. She was lost in thoughts that were going in a thousand directions.

  She had to keep reminding herself that what she really felt like doing—collapsing into a heap of panic and self-pity—wouldn’t help anyone, least of all Rook and Aguinaldo. She had to keep her focus on the case.

  Who were these guys? Were they some of McMain’s frequent fliers? Or were they, in fact, a direct offshoot of ISIS, able to contact the mother ship—in which case they ought to be harnessing federal intelligence assets? Or were they a new and previously unknown splinter cell of Islamic extremism, operating wholly independently?

  More importantly, was there a way of figuring out where they were hiding?

  Her detectives had redoubled their efforts to go through the Counterterrorism Task Force’s list of known suspects. And they had the personnel—courtesy of The Hammer—to toss every apartment, housing project, and rickety single-family house they cared to toss. No effort was being spared.

  But, likewise, no results had turned up.

  Even the scarf lead was coming up empty. Once they realized Rook and Aguinaldo weren’t going to meet Laura Hopper for lunch, Heat had arranged for two detectives from Midtown North to intercept Hopper at the restaurant and interview her.

  She had remembered the scarf, right down to the particular tint of red she had used, and how the leaves turning on a tree near her brownstone had inspired it. The work had been commissioned. Unfortunately, it had been commissioned for a Saudi sheik who was well beyond the reach of the NYPD and the American justice system. The State Department was now making discrete inquiries. Heat had very low expectations about what they’d come up with.

  Hamner had continued his rant while Heat had been lost in her thoughts. But she soon became aware he seemed to be finishing up.

  “So what we’re saying is, we’re nowhere on this,” Hamner said. “Nowhere. We’ve got every fucking unit in the city turning asphalt inside out looking for these two vehicles, but they have just vanished from the face of the earth. Jesus Henry Christmas on a street-meat stick.”

  He was met by a room full of ruefully hung heads and diverted eye contact.

  “Okay, okay. We have to get out ahead of this thing with the media. We’re going to look like a bunch of jackasses no matter what we do. But maybe if we play the sympathy card they won’t completely kill us. Heat!”

  Heat looked up from the desk.

  “You’re the sympathy card,” Hamner said. “You’re going on TV asking for the public’s help to find your husband. Then the media will have to play nice. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even get a lead or two out of it. If we announce an emergency presser in front of the Two-Oh, can you handle that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Heat said.

  “Good. Now get the blood cleaned off. You look like a goddamned extra from Braveheart.”

  Twenty-five minutes later, Heat was clutching the side of a podium that had been placed on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the Twentieth Precinct.

  She had cleaned up her face and, at the insistence of a nervous public information officer, applied a layer of cover-up. She had also changed into the uniform she kept hanging behind her office door. Better optics, she was told. Plus, the hat hid one of the cuts on her forehead.

  There had been no time to set up lighting, so it was just Heat and the klieg lights from the cameras. And unlike the press conferences announcing high-profile arrests or big drug busts—where there are any number of cops jockeying for the refracted glory of a spot in the background—Heat was facing them alone. No one wanted a piece of this.

  “Good afternoon,” Heat began, trying to maintain a professional demeanor. “At approximately 12:03 this afternoon, there was a brazen kidnapping here on 82nd Street, outside
the entrance to the Twentieth Precinct.”

  She ran through the narrative: the SUVs, the known escape route, the description of the suspects, the belief that the same men were responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Tam Svejda.

  Then she reached the part the assembled media had been waiting for. “The victims are Inez Aguinaldo, a detective here at the Twentieth Precinct…and Jameson Rook, a reporter for—”

  The reporters didn’t wait for her to finish. There was a howling chorus of questions that came all at once. It took one of the PIOs to shout them down and regain order of the press conference.

  “I’m sorry,” Heat said when they had quieted. “I know you have a lot of questions, and we certainly do, too. But I will not be taking questions at this time. At this point, anything I said would likely be supposition.

  “The main point of this event is to ask the public for its help. We are urging anyone who has seen anything suspicious to call our tips line. We have eight million pairs of eyeballs in this city, and we want every one of them on the lookout for those SUVs and for any clue that might help us find Detective Aguinaldo and Mr. Rook. The NYPD can’t do this alone. We need your help and we need it now. On behalf of the New York Police Department, I thank you all for your help and cooperation.”

  As soon as she placed the period on the end of the sentence, the press corps lobbed a new hail of inquiries in her direction. But Heat had already turned away and disappeared inside the precinct.

  The moment she was out of sight of the cameras, she felt her legs go wobbly. The strain of keeping it together had finally gotten to be too great. She could no longer muster the courageous front she had labored to maintain.

  She sagged, finding a safe landing spot on one of the benches in the lobby, right beneath the MOST WANTED posters. And that’s where she was still sitting, trying to concentrate on her breathing so the panic wouldn’t completely overrun her, when The Hammer came into her view.

  Hamner was a man whose only light exposure most days came from fluorescent bulbs. Yet as Heat lifted her chin to look at him, she saw a face that looked especially wan.

  “What?” Heat said. “Was I that bad?”

  “No. You were fine,” Hamner said with uncharacteristic gentleness. “Can you come upstairs with me? There’s something you have to see.”

  They were gathered around Raley’s computer. The king of all surveillance media had returned from his siesta, though it looked like it hadn’t done him much good.

  The Hammer wasn’t the only one who had lost color. As she approached, Heat noticed Ochoa’s hand had gone to his throat. It was the same gesture of vulnerability she had subconsciously resorted to after she’d watched the first American ISIS video.

  Suddenly Heat put it together. Those savages had not wasted time carrying out their threat. There had been another video. And this time Rook was the centerpiece.

  “Oh, God,” she said, bringing her hand to her mouth.

  The world suddenly seemed to go on a slant. The blood flow to her brain had stopped. Her muscles stopped responding to her commands. She felt her body collapsing. She felt her world collapsing.

  Rook was dead. Her always. Her everything.

  Heat heard a moan. It was bestial, brutish, somehow elemental. It was a cry of ultimate grief, of boundless suffering; it was the kind of wailing heard at funerals, when mourners beat their breasts and tore at their hair. The sound of a heart breaking.

  Then Heat realized, with surreal detachment, the sound was coming from her. Her lungs were pushing the air, her voice box was doing the rattling, her mouth was issuing this aberrant racket. And yet she was powerless to stop it.

  The pain. It was searing, omnipresent. Her beautiful Rook. The face she loved. The arms that comforted her. The body that fit so perfectly with hers. How could that be gone?

  Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t really seeing anything. Just blackness. Or maybe just light. It was like her optic nerve had gone on strike and was now just issuing some neutral signal.

  She felt someone else’s arms on her. And hands. She seemed to know she was no longer standing. Her personal battle with gravity had ended in a loss. The only reason she was still upright was someone else—she couldn’t even guess at who—was holding her up.

  What had she been before Rook? She’d had a life, but she hadn’t really been living. Rook had given her existence meaning. He had brought her joy. What would her life be without Rook? There would never again be joy.

  The moaning stopped for a moment. And that was when her ears permitted another voice to enter them. It was insistent. And it kept saying the same thing.

  “He’s still alive,” Ochoa was saying. “It’s okay. We still have a chance. He’s still alive. We’re going to find him. He’s still alive.”

  Heat’s vision returned suddenly. She saw she was being held by Feller and Ochoa, both of whom had caught her when they realized she was about to faint. Raley and Rhymer were looking on with concern.

  “Just take deep breaths, Captain,” Raley said. “Deep breaths. Easy now.”

  She felt around, realized they weren’t going to let her fall. Tentatively, she pushed herself away. She got her feet firmly on the ground, her legs underneath her. They had strength again.

  “I’m sorry,” Hamner said. “It should have been the first thing out of my mouth that Rook was still okay. I’m so sorry, Heat.”

  Heat just nodded her acknowledgement. She wasn’t sure she could talk yet.

  “Rhymer, go get the captain some coffee,” Hamner said. “Or better, juice. When was the last time you ate, Heat? You can’t let your blood sugar get low like that. Let’s just take fifteen minutes to let everyone—”

  The suggestion that they pause, that they do anything that wasn’t immediately directed toward getting Rook and Aguinaldo back to them, was what brought Heat back to her full senses.

  “No,” she said hoarsely, her larynx still raw from her funereal keening. “We don’t have fifteen minutes. What’s going on? You guys were all looking at Raley’s screen when I walked in and fainted on you. It’s another video, isn’t it?”

  “Captain,” Ochoa said. “Just give yourself a few minutes to—”

  “Knock it off,” she said sharply. “I’m fine. It’s Rook and Aguinaldo who are in trouble. They’re the only thing we need to be focused on right now.”

  She realized Ochoa was still holding on to her arm. She shook him off and walked over to Raley’s computer.

  “Play the video, Rales,” she said. “That’s an order.”

  Raley went over to his terminal and sat down. Moments later, a grainy video appeared in the middle of the screen. It looked to have been shot on the same camera as the first one.

  The room was clearly different. Smaller. And the camera was zoomed in farther, making it more difficult to make out any surroundings. There was no natural light, just a dim bulb somewhere overhead. The back wall was shiny, unpainted corrugated steel. It could have been a storage unit, or a warehouse, or one of any number of industrial structures.

  Rook was in the middle of the frame. He was kneeling, with his arms trussed behind him—and presumably his legs, too, though they were not in the frame. His position and posture were exactly the same as Tam Svejda’s had been, though he didn’t have a bag over his head. American ISIS wanted the world to know that it had captured its big prize, the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning celebrity journalist.

  On either side of Rook were what appeared to be the same men from the first video. Their masks, gloves, sunglasses, clothing, and headgear were also identical. As before, the one on the left did the talking.

  “Greetings,” he said again in the Darth Vader voice. “We again come to you in the name of Allah, the Supreme Being, the Living One, the Constant Forgiver. May Allah bless all believers who hear this message now.”

  “Allahu akbar,” the one on the right interjected.

  Rook was staring straight ahead, his face seemingly etched in stone, with only t
he occasional blink to signify he was not a statue. Whatever emotion Rook was feeling, Heat couldn’t discern it. There had to be fear in him. But he was not allowing it to show. Not even the woman who knew him best could see any crack in his brave facade. He would not give his captors that satisfaction.

  Still, Heat discovered after just a few seconds that she couldn’t look at him anymore. It hurt too much to see him like that. She turned her attention back to his masked captor.

  “Great is the power of those who follow in the path of Allah, who celebrate the Quran as the sacred word of Allah, who understand the revelations made by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, are the last and truest testimony of Allah gifted to man,” the one on the left said. “Great also is the power of those who find inspiration in the supreme leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the caliphate he has founded. May the call to unite the world under the flag of Islam motivate all Muslims to declare jihad on our shared enemies.”

  “Allahu akbar,” said the man on the right.

  Heat noticed, as she had with the first video, that the man’s attention seemed to flick back and forth between the camera and something to the side of it. She was more sure than ever there was someone else in the room. It was the person who had been giving orders to the four thugs who pulled off the kidnapping and who was also clearly the boss of the men in front of the camera.

  “As you can see, because Allah is great, He has led us to your imperialistic pig journalist king, Jameson Rook, who now cowers before us,” the man on the left continued. “His efforts to run and hide like a scared cockroach were nothing compared to the might of Allah. Let it be known that all enemies of Allah will suffer a similar fate. Even now, when the infidels attack the Islamic State with their airplanes and their armies, it is as it was in the time of Hijrah, when Muhammad, peace be upon him, was forced to flee Mecca, only to again make his triumphant return. So will it be for ISIS. The righteous forces of Allah will always triumph.”