by Osborne, Jon
The sound of feet leaving the room filled her ears.
And then, “Angel? Can you hear me, honey?”
Malachai. His voice sounded tiny, scared, like that of a terrified child’s.
“Mmrgh.”
Angel felt his hand cover hers. His other hand went to the side of her face. Both were shaking.
She opened her eyes slowly, a newborn baby taking in its strange new world for the very first time.
Malachai tried to smile at her, but it was a smile that didn’t quite reach his beautiful brown eyes. He was just too scared.
“Don’t try to talk, Angel,” he said. “Everything’s going to be OK. The doctors said that you’re going to make a complete recovery. Just rest up now, baby. Close your eyes and rest up. I’ll be right here waiting for you when you wake up again.”
Angel did as she was told. A moment later, her world faded away again.
CHAPTER 141
Sue Lyn Pepperton’s heart leapt up into her throat when her cellphone rang again thirty seconds later.
She fumbled to pick it up off the desk. “Hello?”
The man on the other end of the line sounded very angry. “You’ve been extremely disobedient, Senator. You were clearly instructed to keep our business private. Now you’ll have to pay for ignoring those instructions. At exactly ten a.m. tomorrow morning, tune your television into the emergency-services channel on your local cable system. Your set has already been wired so that it will be the only one able to pick up my broadcast.”
Sue Lyn’s mouth went dry. Her ears rang. Her stomach swam with nausea. “What the hell is this about?”
“Just do as you’re told, Senator. You’ll find out exactly what it’s about at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Do not defy me again. When the FBI agents reach your house, send them away. Tell them that you were just scared with all of the events surrounding your husband. They’ll understand. After you watch my program, make contact with Angel Monroe in Cleveland, Ohio. She’s a private investigator and the only person who can save your daughter now. In the meantime, make discreet calls to the German government and arrange for Stefan von Waldenberg’s release from prison.”
The phone clicked dead in Sue Lyn’s ear.
A moment later, the doorbell sounded at the front door of her beautiful Georgetown home.
CHAPTER 142
Angel awoke the next morning to bright shafts of sunlight streaming in through the windows of her room at Fairview General Hospital, fifteen miles west of Cleveland.
Snoring in a chair next to her bed, Malachai was still fast asleep. A thin blanket lay in a tangled ball on the floor at his feet.
He came awake with a start a moment later. “Angel!” he said, rising from his chair and rubbing at his tired eyes. Angel smiled at him, knowing that he’d probably stayed up most of the night watching over her. That’s just the kind of man Malachai was. The kind of man he’d always been. It was what had drawn her to the jerk in the first place. “Thank God!” Malachai went on. “How are you feeling, honey?”
Angel groaned. It hurt like hell to talk. Her esophagus had been rubbed raw from the thick plastic tube. “My throat is killing me,” she croaked.
Malachai went to her bedside table and poured her a glass of water from the pitcher there before holding it up to her lips with a trembling hand. Angel drank deeply, the lukewarm liquid tasting sweeter to her than the finest French champagne in the world.
“Dana,” she asked, weakly. “How is Dana?”
Malachai frowned. “Last I heard the woman you were with at the time of the accident was still in surgery. The doctors don’t know if she’ll make it yet.”
The tears came from Angel’s eyes then, but she was much too exhausted to cry fully. She tried to sit up in bed, badly tweaking a tendon in her neck in the process and sending a hot jolt of pain bolting down her left arm. She ignored it. “I’ve got to out of here,” she said, again trying to straighten in the bed. “I’ve got to check on Dana.”
Malachai’s hands went to her shoulders and pushed her lightly back down into the bed. “Not now, honey. You need to get better first. You need to rest up and get your strength back.”
He smiled at her mischievously. “For you and our baby.”
CHAPTER 143
Sue Lyn Pepperton stared at the snowy white image on Comcast Channel 404 for a solid hour before the antique grandfather clock in her living room finally struck ten and the picture blinked on.
A man in a black ski mask adjusted the viewfinder on the opposite end of the connection, bringing the picture into sharp focus. What Sue Lyn saw on the screen made her want to throw up.
Naked and strapped down to a chair with a dirty rag stuffed into her mouth; Jasmine’s quivering thighs had been tied three feet apart with thick ropes. A large white bed sheet had been spread out on the hardwood floor at her feet. A look of sheer terror was frozen on her beautiful face. Turning her misty green eyes to the viewfinder, Sue Lyn’s daughter mouthed a single, heartbreaking word.
Mommy.
Hot tears streamed down Sue Lyn’s face. A moment later, the man in the ski mask reentered the picture from the left side of the frame and inserted a long needle deep into a vein on her daughter’s right arm before depressing the plunger.
The spontaneous abortion began almost immediately.
The picture blinked off again suddenly. Five seconds later, Sue Lyn’s cellphone rang in her hand.
“One down, one to go, Senator. Have you begun negotiations for Stefan von Waldenberg’s release from prison yet?”
Sue Lyn felt dizzy, her thoughts frozen on the gruesome scene she’d just witnessed: her unborn grandchild dead on a madman’s floor.
One down, one to go.
Her voice shook uncontrollably. She swallowed hard and tried to pull herself together for Jasmine’s sake. She needed to. It was her only chance of saving her life. “They said it would take at least a week to arrange for an exchange – von Waldenberg for my daughter. Please, sir, don’t hurt my baby. I can pay you. Any amount of money you’d like. Just name a price and I’ll have it to you within twenty-four hours, I swear it.”
The man on the other end of the line laughed harshly. “Pay me? What makes you think that I want your money, Senator? No, you pompous nigger, I assure you that I won’t make things that easy on you. I want you to suffer, just as your family made my family suffer. Now listen to me very carefully. You have exactly two days to arrange for Stefan von Waldenberg’s release. In the meantime, I’m e-mailing you very specific instructions on where I want the private investigator stationed. She must be alone, Senator. If I even think anyone else is with her, your daughter will be executed at once.”
CHAPTER 144
Angel looked up at Malachai in complete shock.
“Our baby?” she asked, incredulously.
Malachai smiled gently at her. “That’s right, honey. We’re going to be parents. Me and you. Can you believe that shit? They ran some tests on you when they brought you in after the accident. Routine procedure, they said. They needed to make sure you weren’t pregnant before giving you any drugs that might hurt a baby.”
Angel didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did a little of both at the same time. “Oh my God, Malachai,” she said. “Just, oh my God.”
Sinking back into the bed, she let out a deep breath and tried to process the stunning news.
There was a tiny little life growing inside of her! A tiny little life growing inside of her that would depend on her for everything. It was almost too much to comprehend. Angel’s jumbled thoughts bumped into one another inside her reeling brain before melting away into an indecipherable jumble of useless letters. Then she took another deep breath.
She and Malachai were going to be parents.
Her head was still spinning from the news when a distinguished-looking black woman in her mid-sixties knocked on the door a moment later. The woman was wearing a black suit jacket, a black skirt and black heels. Dark sunglasses covere
d her eyes.
The woman pushed back the sunglasses on her head and stepped inside the room. “Miss Monroe?” she asked. “My name is Sue Lyn Pepperton.”
CHAPTER 145
Jared von Waldenberg leaned back in his chair and lit up a huge Cuban cigar while the sounds of Brahms’ Scherzo filled his den in Creek Run, Mississippi.
Miles O’Reilly and Seth Collins were kneeling on the floor on the other side of his massive desk. They were handcuffed and naked, blood dripping down from faces that had been violently transformed into ugly masses of purple bruises. Two lead pipes and a bicycle chain had gotten the job done, something of an unsubtle homage to one of the Race Master’s all-time favorite movies, Cape Fear.
Von Waldenberg rose from his chair and made his way around the desk, clucking his tongue in disappointment. “This is very unfortunate, my friends,” he said. “You two were among my finest men. What the hell happened?”
A series of indistinguishable grunts came from the purple mess that had once been Miles O’Reilly’s face. For his part, Seth Collins had been beaten so savagely that it rendered even the facsimile of speech quite impossible.
Von Waldenberg sighed and blew out a huge cloud of fragrant smoke. To purify his race, a few of its best members would have to die for the cause. A hard truth, perhaps, but a simple enough one to understand nonetheless.
There was no joy in his voice as he turned to Bane and gave the order to finish them off.
Snarling angrily, the dog immediately did what it had been raised to do since birth.
CHAPTER 146
“Absolutely not,” Malachai snapped. “She’s not going to be used as human bait, lady. She’s recovering in the hospital, for Christ’s sake!”
Angel held up a hand to quiet him. Shaking her head in confusion, she looked over at Sue Lyn Pepperton. “What does this Jared von Waldenberg want to do with me?”
The Alabama senator lowered her eyes. “I don’t know, Miss Monroe. All I know is that he specifically demanded you.”
When Pepperton lifted her gaze again a moment later, Angel saw that the woman’s eyes were with tears. “Please, Miss Monroe. You’re my only hope.”
Malachai slammed his hand down onto the food tray next to Angel’s bed hard enough to rattle the silverware in a nerve-jarring cacophony of jangling metal. “No, lady! She’s pregnant! Listen to me very carefully: the answer is no! No once and no a million fucking times! I don’t give a shit if you are a senator.”
Angel turned to Malachai and let out a slow breath. “Settle down, honey. Why don’t you let me talk to the senator in private for a minute?”
Malachai’s eyes flashed with anger as he stormed to the doorway of the hospital room.
“Don’t you do it, Angel,” he said, turning around to face them and holding her stare before slamming shut the door behind him. “Don’t you dare fucking do it.”
CHAPTER 147
Jared von Waldenberg stacked the traitors’ bones calmly in a neat pile next to the barbecue pit behind the Brotherhood’s white-supremacist compound deep in the woods of Creek Run, Mississippi.
Dried in a kiln for three hours at four hundred degrees, the bones had been treated with a special accelerant so as to be ready for tonight’s festivities.
Von Waldenberg took a deep breath to steady his nerves. The end game was finally upon them. Either his brother would be freed from his cold German prison cell to take his rightful place at the head of their organization, or both the nigger women would die very violent deaths here tonight. It was as simple as that.
Plucking Miles O’Reilly’s bashed-in skull off the top of the pile, von Waldenberg held the steady flame of his gold Zippo lighter beneath it. After a moment or two, the skull began to smoke.
Twenty seconds later, it burst into bright orange flames.
CHAPTER 148
Twelve hours later, Angel shivered uncontrollably in the cold night air at Edgewater Park in Lakewood.
The sound of the waves lapping against the Lake Erie shoreline competed with the drumbeat of her hammering heart to provide the eerie soundtrack for the scene. Directly above her head, a single, angry seagull called out in its screeching voice before suddenly flapping away into the distance over the lake in a heart-stopping explosion of furiously pumping wings.
Angel’s thoughts flashed to Malachai and to the unborn child inside her womb. Malachai had been livid with her for agreeing to help out the senator, of course, but Angel hadn’t really had a choice in the matter. Mothers throughout the world shared an unshakable bond, a bond formed from loving someone else so much that you thought it would make you die. And now Angel had become a part of that very special sisterhood. Would be a part of it for the rest of her life.
Besides, there were FBI agents stationed all along the perimeter of the park to protect her – including a very angry Bruce Blankenship. Nothing could go wrong.
Could it?
Angel shook her head violently to clear away the troubling thought, fighting off another body-racking shiver. Of course nothing could wrong. She was perfectly safe here, with all of the resources of the Unites States government marshaled around her to make sure of that.
In the branches twenty yards to her right, the wind rattled like dry bones in a cloth sack. A moment later, the tiny transmitter equipped with a GPS tracking system sounded in her left ear.
“Angel, can you hear me?” Sue Lyn Pepperton asked.
Angel put a finger to her ear. “Yes, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” Pepperton answered. “We’ve got the place surrounded. Is there any sign of them yet?”
Angel squinted her eyes into the darkness and toward the entrance of the park a hundred yards away. “No,” she said. “Nothing yet.”
But the words had no sooner left her mouth before a pair of bright white headlights pierced the pitch-black night like a dragon’s glowing eyes, bobbing up and down from the front of a huge pickup truck that was careening wildly over a series of foot-high speed bumps spaced fifteen feet apart. Almost immediately, the sharp reports of automatic gunfire shattered the stillness of the night from seven different directions.
Everything was sheer chaos after that. A man screamed in the distance as a bullet ripped through his throat. The huge pickup truck burst into flames as yet another bullet slammed directly into the full tank of gas.
From there, Angel felt as though she were watching something out of an action movie. Stunned, she tried desperately to process the unbelievable scene unfolding in front of her eyes, much too preoccupied with the events going on right now to notice the huge blonde man dressed in black who’d slipped up behind her in the darkness.
Clamping a large, gloved hand over her mouth, the man stabbed a sharp needle deep into her jugular vein.
“Let’s go, nigger,” the blonde man whispered into her ear. “I’ve got someone who’s just dying to meet you – and he ain’t exactly the kind of man who likes waiting, if you know what I mean.”
Angel’s eyelids fluttered briefly as the potent drug took effect. A moment later, the familiar blackness closed in on the edges of her vision as the huge blonde man threw her limp body over his powerful right shoulder and carried her down to the waiting speedboat fifty feet below.
CHAPTER 149
Angel moaned groggily as she came awake sometime later in a beautifully appointed den.
She looked down in horror to see that she’d been tethered to a wooden chair by thin lengths of rope that were cutting off the circulation in her wrists and ankles, turning the skin around the ropes a sickening purple.
Her skull felt like it might explode from the intense pressure building up behind her eyes. She vaguely remembered being driven to an airport somewhere after the chaotic abduction at Edgewater Park, but then she’d slipped back into unconsciousness when the large blonde man had stabbed another sharp needle deep into her neck.
Another huge blonde man – different than the one from the park – sat behind a massive desk five feet
away, frowning darkly at her. On his desk, the tiny transmitter she’d been wearing in her left ear had been smashed into a hundred little pieces of destroyed technology.
The man came around the desk while the sounds of Phitzner’s Palestrina floated out of an antique record player over in the corner. Angel’s breath caught in her throat when his gaze locked onto hers.
Jared von Waldenberg’s bright blue eyes bulged wildly from their sockets. “It’s all fucked up, Miss Monroe,” he said, clearly panicked. “They haven’t released my brother from prison yet – and they’re not going to. Word just came from Germany that it’s not going to happen.”
Angel stared up at the man. She tried to keep her voice even as she choked out the words. “You don’t have to do this,” she said, trying to soothe his obviously jangled nerves. “It’s not too late to let Jasmine Pepperton go. You still have time to do the right thing.”
The man lowered his stare and shook his head. “No. I need to follow this thing all the way through to the end. I’m much too far along to just stop now. Surely you can understand that, can’t you?”
The man stepped back and motioned to a young blonde man who was standing next to the door. The muscular young blonde nodded and stepped forward before slipping another needle deep into a vein in Angel’s right arm.
Jared von Waldenberg’s face was the last thing she saw before her world melted away.
“Not the abortion drug, Miss Monroe,” he said softly. “Just a little something to help you sleep.”
In Angel’s drugged mind, she was playing with her baby in a beautiful park on a perfect summer’s day. A gorgeous little girl with jet-black hair and bright hazel eyes who was looking up at her and cooing softly. The sound was enough to shatter Angel’s heart into a million tiny little pieces right inside her badly constricted chest.