by Неизвестный
“Don’t talk to me.”
For the first time, Quinn saw how pained Jeff Merritt was. His hair was out of place, his eyes had bags under them, and his clothes had been worn for well over twenty-four hours. Merritt lost the woman he loved to a sadistic killer. Quinn had almost been in those shoes. To think he nearly lost Miranda twice to a killer…but the fact that she survived didn’t mean he couldn’t understand what Merritt was going through.
“Jeff,” Quinn said quietly, “I’ve been where you are.”
“You know nothing.”
“Guilt that you couldn’t stop Paige from disobeying orders. Anger that she put her life on the line. Remorse that you didn’t tell her you loved her the last time she walked out your door.”
Quinn saw that he had hit the nail on the head with the last point.
“Dr. Kincaid is a consultant for the San Diego Police Department. This is what he does for a living. He figured out Roger’s connection to Trask.”
“And the Bureau is filled with incompetent fools? I’ll tell that to your pal Vigo.”
“The Bureau is overworked and understaffed, and you know as well as I do that as soon as Trask’s trail dried up, we worked other cases. You know how it is.”
“I’ve never stopped working Paige’s murder.”
“I know. And that’s why you’re too close. What were you thinking sending Mick Mallory in?”
“Mallory is the best damn undercover agent in the Bureau.”
“Was,” Quinn corrected. “Until his wife was murdered. He’s mentally unstable and you know it. And how could he have let Lucy be raped?”
Merritt frowned. “He must have been in a position where he couldn’t have helped her without blowing his cover. Last time he checked in there were six people, including him and Trask. Five men, one woman. He was waiting for the right time—”
“Right time for what?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You sent Mallory to assassinate Trask.” Quinn shook his head. It all made sense now.
“It’s not supposed to be a suicide mission.”
“Since when do you have the authority to send in an assassin? Not to mention a man who isn’t trained for it?”
“What makes you think I don’t have the authority?”
He might, though if the operation blew up around them Merritt would be the scapegoat. Quinn had seen it happen before. But this time? Quinn highly doubted Merritt had any sanction for Mallory’s assignment.
“I’m going to play it straight with you, Merritt, and I want you to be straight with me. Okay?”
“What?”
“Kincaid believes Roger is working closely with someone he went to school with. Trask Enterprises began five years after he graduated from high school, but Roger Morton had no job, no college, no friends. Kincaid got the list of every student at Stonebridge Academy who had been at the school with Roger. His father identified three who had been Morton’s closest friends. One is dead. One is a stockbroker in New York. The other was expelled. I learned he’s on the board of directors of six legitimate companies, but can’t get a recent picture of him. My contact says that he owns stock in all the companies, sends his proxy to the meetings, and no one claims to have seen him. I have one old picture of him when he was sixteen, right before he was expelled.”
Quinn slid over the picture of a blond teenager with icy blue eyes. “Kate is the only person who has seen him and is still alive. I’m going to get this to her.”
“You’re working with her.” But Merritt couldn’t take his eyes off the photograph.
“I want you to drop all charges against her.”
“No.”
“Give her immunity, Merritt, and don’t tell me you can’t.”
“Paige died because of her.”
“Paige died because of him.” Quinn slapped his hand on the photograph of Adam Scott.
They were in a holding area of a small military facility. If it could be called a military facility. It looked more like a makeshift training camp in the middle of the desert. Red Rock, Jack had said, but Kate told Dillon they were at least twenty miles from Red Rock and she wasn’t one hundred percent sure where they were without looking at her maps. Dillon didn’t buy into conspiracy theories, but right now he would have believed virtually anything anyone told him about this place. Off the grid, Dillon thought. The men were not in standard military gear, and everyone knew Jack Kincaid.
Kate paced anxiously, like a caged tigress. “What’s taking so long?”
Dillon couldn’t say, so he didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “What kind of place is this?”
Kate shrugged. “Looks like a private mercenary training camp, except that their equipment isn’t surplus. State of the art. Did you catch a glimpse of the radar system at the airport?”
“No.” Didn’t look like an airport, either. One runway and a solitary building in the middle of nowhere. They were being held underground. “So is this run by the military or not?”
“Depends who you ask and when you ask it.”
“You’re as helpful as Jack.”
“You really don’t know what your brother does?”
“I haven’t seen him in eleven years.”
That surprised Kate. “Really?”
“Why are you surprised?”
“Because…I don’t know. You seem close.”
“We were, at one time.” And seeing Jack again conflicted Dillon. They were different people today, with no way to regain what they’d had growing up. They’d grown apart, leading different lives, going down dramatically different paths. Dillon hadn’t been faced with the choices Jack had, but deep down Dillon knew he couldn’t walk away from his family forever, to only show up at funerals. His parents, his brothers and sisters, they were as much part of Dillon’s life as his work.
“Jack joined the army right out of high school. He was going to put in the minimum years required to qualify for the free college education. Something happened his first tour. He’s never spoken of it, but he became career military and chose to keep his family at arm’s length.” Dillon rubbed his face. “Before that, we were close. If you’d asked me twenty years ago if Jack would stop speaking to his family without an explanation, I’d have laughed. But it happened and we’ve learned to live with it.”
“That doesn’t explain why he’s helping you now, when he doesn’t even know his sister.”
“Loyalty,” Dillon said. “A sense of duty.” He stared at Kate. “Very much the same reasons you’ve been hiding out and breaking the law—your loyalty and duty to your partner.”
Kate stopped pacing for a minute and looked at him. He was standing by the door, looking out the lone window into a hallway that was gray and empty. Though the room was underground and air-conditioned, it was still blazing hot. June in the Nevada desert.
She wanted to argue with him, explain that it was more than simply loyalty that had her dedicated to stopping Trask. But he wasn’t thinking about her. His eyes were far off. Thinking about the missing years with his brother? Or what future Lucy might—or might not—have?
“We’re going to get her in time,” Kate said quietly.
Dillon turned to face her. She was complex, and he couldn’t say that he knew her. He couldn’t even say that he would have made the choices she’d made in life. But something deep down in her core, which shone through in her vibrant blue eyes, told him she was all there. Not a renegade FBI agent, not a narrow-minded revenge nut, but a disciplined and trained federal cop.
It was the action that did it, he realized. She’d been pent up for two years at the observatory, on the run for three years before that. Yet six hours on the move and she had developed a calm—pacing notwithstanding.
“Lucy’s a smart kid,” he said, not knowing what to say about his sister. Dillon had been twenty when she was born. Already out of the house, in college. Planning on medical school. Even Patrick was thirteen years older than Lucy. She was practically an only child. S
he’d grown up fast—not only because of her older brothers and sisters, but because she’d seen death at an early age. She’d been seven when Justin—her seven-year-old nephew—was killed. They’d shielded her to some extent, but it had affected all of them.
“Smart and sassy and spoiled,” Dillon said, his voice cracking.
Kate reached up and touched his shoulders. “Lucy is lucky to have family who loves her so much,” she said quietly.
Dillon took Kate’s hand. “You didn’t.”
She shook her head. “Maybe that’s why I fight for the underdog. I’m okay, Dillon. I know you think I’m this fly-off-the-handle maverick, but I am okay. I accept that I could die. It’s not a death wish, it’s not being stupid. But if I go in with fear, I’ll never be able to do my job.”
“You don’t have a job. You’re doing this for revenge.” Or was she? Maybe not revenge so much as justice. He began to see and admire Kate in a whole different light.
“Maybe. But I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. Trask will kill Lucy without a second thought if the feds swarm the island. She won’t have a chance. Either the house is rigged to explode or he’ll put a bullet in her head. He doesn’t want to be caught, but more than that he doesn’t want her to live.”
“You and Jack seem to agree on this.”
“Jack’s seen a hell of a lot more than I have.” She searched his eyes. “So have you. You’ve been inside the criminal minds of sadistic men and women like Trask. You try to make sense of it to stop it. To be honest, I’d rather take my chances face-to-face than look inside their heads to figure out what makes them tick. But without men like you, we’d never be able to learn why. And maybe stop it from happening in the future.”
Dillon touched Kate’s cheek. She leaned into his hand and closed her eyes. For a brief moment, he felt her strength and vulnerability. Saw her loneliness, how weary she was of this hunt. But it was her vocation; she would not give up.
Dillon’s phone vibrated and he pulled it from his pocket. A picture came in with a message from Quinn Peterson.
Show to Kate.
He turned the image to show Kate. “Know him?”
She stared, her face going white. “Trask.” She swallowed. “Where did you get that?”
“Peterson.” He was about to call.
“Don’t. Text him. It’ll take him longer to trace it, and we should be gone by then.”
“I thought we agreed that Peterson needs to be clued into the two sets of coordinates.” But he sent the text message. “He’s not coming after you.”
“Maybe not, but others will.”
“Who?”
“Jeff Merritt, for one.”
“Who’s he?”
“He used to be my direct supervisor, Paige’s as well. He and Paige were also…involved.”
“Isn’t that a conflict?”
She shrugged. “It happens. It wasn’t a problem until he started pulling us off the Trask Enterprises investigation. It caused a huge problem between him and Paige and we—Paige and I—got reckless.”
Kate sighed, ran a hand through her short blond hair. “Merritt was worried about her safety, and because of that pulled us instead of giving us backup. We were pissed. Paige went to him, and I thought she had gotten sanction, but…”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me, Kate.”
She was obviously torn. “When we stormed the warehouse after getting the tip from Denise about the Russian girls being illegally brought in, I thought we had backup. Paige said—implied—that we were covered. But…” She shrugged.
“She lied.”
“No,” Kate said emphatically. “She didn’t. I just didn’t understand what she had planned.”
“She lied to you.”
“No, dammit!”
“She lied and died and you’ve been blaming yourself because you can’t blame your dead friend.”
“Paige was the closest thing I had to family! Mine was nonexistent. A mother who couldn’t look at me, elderly grandparents who didn’t talk to me, and when they died, I was shuffled from stranger to stranger. Paige…she was closer than blood. I’m not going to taint her name.”
Kate’s eyes were red, sweat glistened on her brow. “You don’t know how she died. How she was brutalized. You didn’t see her body, shredded. Blood everywhere. Her eyes—”
Dillon pulled Kate to him, held her while her body shook with soundless sobs.
The truth, at last.
His phone vibrated and Kate jumped back. She gave him an odd half-smile, embarrassed. He touched her cheek. “It’s okay, Kate. I don’t think you’re weak. It takes a strong person to be honest with others, but the strongest people are honest with themselves.”
He looked at the phone, showed Peterson’s message to Kate.
Adam Scott, 39. Expelled from Stonebridge, disappeared for six years. We’re tracking his finances now. There was a death at the school Scott and Morton attended—a kid named Trevor Conrad. We’re looking into him as well as another guy, Paul Ullman, who was Scott’s roommate. Tell Kate that Mick Mallory is undercover and will take down Trask/Scott first chance he gets. Be careful.
“Mallory,” Kate muttered.
“Know him?”
“No, but I’ve heard of him. And he and Jeff Merritt were close. Merritt must have sent him in.” She frowned. “I don’t understand why. How do we have someone on the inside, but Trask—Adam Scott—still got to Lucy?”
“Good question,” Dillon said.
“Give Peterson the coordinates. But,” Kate implored him, “make him understand that they must use extreme caution. Not just for their safety, but for Lucy’s.” She didn’t know if she was doing the right thing, but she’d agreed when they left Mexico that they would tell the FBI what they’d learned. She had to live up to her word. She wanted Dillon to trust her. To believe in her.
Dillon nodded, typed in the message.
Kate glanced at her watch, started pacing again. “It’s been thirty minutes. They should be done.”
“Impatient, impatient.” Jack sauntered into the room. “We’re fueled up and I downloaded some maps of the area. It’s just shy of nine hundred miles to a small airstrip outside Bellingham. It’ll take me forty-five minutes to get from the base of Mount Baker to the campground. I also have a copter on alert. A pal of mine in Canada. He’s going to meet us at the airstrip, take you to an island near the one you think Lucy is on.”
“Why do we need a helicopter?” Dillon asked.
“I pulled down a map of the island Kate thinks Lucy is on. No way to land anything, even a copter—”
“We can’t hit the island from above,” Kate interrupted. “They’ll hear. We need to take a boat and—”
Jack held his hands up. “Do I look stupid? I have a safe landing spot and a boat ready for you ten miles from the island. Hank will land the copter and get you situated. You’ll be in communication with him, and if you need an emergency pickup he’ll be there. I trust him.”
Dillon raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. Jack didn’t seem like the type of man to trust anyone, yet he had this mercenary base—which might or might not be run by the U.S. military—in the middle of the Nevada desert, and a convenient pal up in the Pacific Northwest who just happened to have a helicopter.
“And you’re going to take my plane?” Kate said.
“You mean Professor Fox’s plane?”
She glared at him.
“It sounds like a good plan,” Dillon intervened. “Let’s go.”
Dillon watched as Jack and Kate bickered about the plan. He held back and looked at the message from Peterson.
I can’t get clearance for backup yet, but I will be there. Be damn careful.
“Move it, Dil,” Jack called back. “Time is running out.”
Dillon tensed. Jack didn’t have to tell him that. And with only the three of them—four if Quinn Peterson made it in time—Dillon didn’t know if anyone
was going to get out alive.
For eight hours Lucy had been locked in the bathroom. She drank water from the sink, but other than that had no food and felt drained. Defeated.
She slept on and off, laying down in the bathtub after an hour when no one came back for her.
What was going on? Why did they take her off the camera? She was grateful, but…
Grateful? Grateful that she had a towel and water and wasn’t being raped? Pathetic, Lucy. Just pathetic. Was this the Stockholm syndrome? Was she going to do anything for them just so they didn’t hurt her again? Thank them for the water?
Get a grip, Luce. This is like torture. Head games. Making you sweat it out, trying to break you.
She had slept through the sunrise, because when she opened her eyes the room wasn’t dark, light was filtering in through the skylight. The dancing dust particles caught in the sunlight were surprisingly beautiful. For the first time, she felt hope…that she just might get out of this. That maybe God was watching out for her.
The door opened and she stifled a scream.
Denise was naked. Her face was swollen, her breasts cut and bleeding, and she was limping.
“Oh my God,” Lucy said without thinking about how Denise had hurt her earlier. “Are you okay?” Stupid question. “Let me help…”
Denise stared at her as if she were insane. Maybe she was, but this woman was in pain. Blood ran down her legs. Lucy took off the towel she was wearing, unmindful of her nudity as she handed it to Denise.
That was when she saw Roger in the doorway. “You’re next.”
Lucy started shaking. She stepped back, almost fell into the tub.
Denise grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the bathroom and into Roger. Lucy jumped backward.
“I need to shower.” Denise shut and locked the door.
Lucy stood there naked, Roger staring at her. She tried to cover herself.
Roger laughed.
“Come on, princess. Your fans are getting restless. Denise is used, they want fresh meat.”
“Please, don’t—”
“Save it for the camera.”
He grabbed her wrists, pulled them behind her back. A man in the corner of the room made crude gyrations with his pelvis. She turned away.