by Cat Connor
Lee knocked. We both stood to the hinge side of the door, against the grimy brick.
Inside, someone shouted something unintelligible.
Lee knocked again.
Another voice called out. Again, I couldn’t understand the words. Maybe it wasn’t English.
I shook my head at Lee.
He reached over and knocked again, this time he followed up with a deep bellow, “FBI. Open the door.”
Noise erupted. Yelling. Shuffling. Panic.
It is peculiar how some people react to us. You’d think the bad guys would learn to control their outbursts and better disguise their guilt. But few people we come across are pleased to have us knock on their door.
Lee kicked the door in and stepped inside. I followed. Two men sat calmly at a filthy table. Not a sign of the panic we’d heard.
“FBI. Who else is here?”
They shook their heads. Language flew from the older man’s lips as he gestured wildly with nicotine-stained fingers. Some things are universal.
“English?” I asked.
They shook their heads.
I had no idea what language they were speaking. I took clues from their appearance: swarthy, lined and leathery skin, dark eyes, dark curly hair. Mediterranean maybe. Greek possibly.
I lifted my radio from my belt and called in our backup. Sam and a few other agents, in a concealed position out of the alleyway, were waiting for my call. Lee cuffed the two men and sat them back-to-back in the middle of the room on the rickety chairs.
He showed them the photo of Rose.
“Seen her?” he asked.
One man flinched; the other stared with cold dark eyes. Somewhere in the back, I heard movement.
“Leave them,” I hissed. “Let’s do it.”
I opened the inner door. A long hallway stretched away from us with a bare light bulb hanging from a wire. It gave off enough light to see four doors in the hall. We stood for a moment, listening.
“To the right,” Lee said. “Could be Albanian.” He cocked his head back toward the other room.
I nodded. I’d considered Greek, so close enough.
I lifted my radio off my belt once more and updated the situation; our backup had already rolled into the alley. A smile flicked across Lee’s face as he heard Sam’s voice in the room behind us. It gave me a sense of security knowing he was there; it was probably the same for Lee.
Lee and I moved fast yet silently through the inner hallway, despite the hot sticky air, the kind of air that hurt to breathe. At the door from where the noise seemed to be coming, we looked at each other from separate sides of the doorway. I held up two fingers. He nodded.
Lee turned the handle. It wasn’t locked.
A scream bounced off the walls. Lee shoved the door open. In front of us, another swarthy man held a blonde girl against him, one hand clamped on her forehead, his free hand holding a knife to her throat. The blade pressed into the white flesh of her neck. Tears slid down her face. A trickle of red ran down her neck.
I trained my weapon on his head. Lee looked for a body shot, through the hostage if necessary. The girl looked like Rose.
“FBI,” I said in a clear voice. “Drop the knife.”
“No,” he replied and shook his head.
Whatever.
“Have it your way,” Lee snarled.
The girl sobbed. The man’s grip tightened.
My palms were sweaty. He pressed the knife harder against her. I pulled the trigger. It seemed to take forever for the bullet to leave the chamber and hit the mark. A hole appeared in his forehead; his expression didn’t change. He fell very slowly. Lee grabbed the girl and lifted her clear. He took her straight out of the room and handed her to a waiting agent, back within seconds.
I stepped forward, kicked the knife away from the body and checked for a pulse. It seemed pointless as a pool of red grew around his head and threatened my boots.
I rifled through the pockets of the dead man. No wallet, no identity information, not even a driver’s license. I felt myself gag as his body odor and the smell from the pooling blood mingled into a cloying stench.
“Nothing,” I said to Lee. “This fucker hasn’t showered for a month. I can’t believe the air in the alley is preferable to being near him.”
Another voice sounded behind Lee. “You okay in there, Ellie?” Sam.
“Yep.” I pulled my phone and snapped a picture of the man. “Search the rest of this place and call in the forensics team. Is there an ambulance for the girl?”
“Called already, she’s with the paramedics now. We’re already searching,” Sam replied.
Lee checked his cell phone then spoke to me, “Caine wants to see you, Ellie.”
“He text you?”
“Yeah.”
“Imagine that?”
Caine had been adamant for the last few years that he wouldn’t be texting any of us, ever. In his words, he preferred to call and hear our delightful voices. And here he was texting. The old dog was learning new tricks, and life was twisting on the weird scale. Happy to leave the rapidly building stench coming from the dearly departed, I strode through the door, leaving Lee with Sam. My body craved oxygen, even the urine-filtered air of the alleyway would suffice for now.
Lee and Sam headed off to help with the search. Caine waited in the outer room by the alley, just inside the doorway.
“That kid, she’s the sister of Rose Van den Berg. They’re Dutch nationals, both reported missing six months ago,” Caine said.
“From where?”
“They went missing in Johannesburg.”
I sensed a backstory worthy of taking a few minutes to hear. “I’m listening,” I said.
“They were traveling with their grandfather from the Netherlands to Johannesburg. At O.R. Tambo International airport, immigration officials questioned the grandfather, saying they believed he was trafficking the girls. He produced their travel documents and assured the officials they were his grandchildren. Yet he was told he would have to go to the police station. The girls were not allowed to accompany him, but given a guarantee that customs officials would watch them. He never saw them again.”
“Clever.”
“When he arrived home, empty-handed, police in the Netherlands told him he was not the first person to fall victim to this particular scam.”
“Interpol?”
“That’s where we got the information.”
We walked out to the ambulance.
“You’re okay?” Caine asked.
I removed my vest, rotated my shoulders, working out the tension from the adrenaline that had flooded my body before and during the takedown.
I nodded. A wave of relief hit me, knowing we’d reunited the sisters and they were alive. Sometimes it’s not all bad news.
“What condition is the body in?”
“You’ll need to use prints to identify the perp,” I replied.
“That bad?” He raised an eyebrow.
I grinned. “Nah, he had no identification on him. My bullet hit him right in the middle of the forehead. Plenty of face left for family to view, if he has any here.”
“We don’t negotiate.” His tone conveyed no room for what-ifs. “These idiots need to learn that and learn it well. Was the kid in immediate danger?”
We stopped in front of the ambulance, where Caine could see the girl receiving medical attention for a small neck wound. She’d need one or two stitches. I could see a Hudson mask on the gurney next to her and wished I could reach in and borrow it. Clean, cool oxygen to rid my lungs of the foul air I’d breathed.
“Yes, she was,” I replied. I angled my body away from the scene in the ambulance.
He nodded. “Then it was the right call.”
“How the hell did they end up in Washington?”
“I’m hoping the girls can tell us.”
“How’d the first kid escape?” The first two men we came across in the rooms weren’t exactly spring chickens, and probably wou
ldn’t be running after anyone. But the knife guy – the putrid smelling man – I knew he wouldn’t let his meal tickets escape without a fight.
“She was left alone for a few minutes and discovered the door unlocked,” Caine replied. “That indicates carelessness, and lack of experience in managing teenage kidnap victims, to me.”
“An unlocked door? That was one lucky break and one feisty kid.”
“Yes,” Caine replied.
“Are we handling this?” It didn’t seem like a case for Delta A.
“No, I’m passing it over to another team.”
We had dedicated teams that specialized in finding lost kids and dealt with trafficking. A joint task force with ICE sprang to mind. I was immensely pleased to be out of that loop. I’d come across a particularly offensive Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent during another case. I certainly didn’t want to repeat the experience. It begged the question of why we were called out in the first place.
“And we received the call – why?”
“I thought it might have been something else.”
I shot him a questioning look. “Like?”
“We have an ongoing case.” He proceeded to explain. “Delta B team is working on a case involving an Albanian crime syndicate. So far, five dead, all with ties to the Albanians. When the kid described how she and her sister were taken and gave a description of the men that held them, the perps sounded Albanian to me.”
The penny poised but didn’t drop. Albanians were linked to human trafficking in both the United Kingdom and Belgium but as far as I knew, here in the United States they were involved in drugs and general thuggery.
“Have the Albanians spread their human trafficking wings to include South Africa and here?” I asked.
“Not as far as we can tell. Everything we’ve seen so far suggests that this is an anomaly,” Caine replied. He seemed certain, yet there was something ticking away under the surface. I could feel it.
My left eyebrow rose. “And, is this connected to Delta B’s case?”
Caine’s mouth twitched. “Different Albanians, but might be good for some information.”
“I take it we’re the only team working in Northern Virginia?”
We may all be Delta, but we were often separate teams. Caine was Delta’s Special Agent in Charge. He moved between us, helping whichever team needed him. Sometimes we all worked together, but mostly the nine of us made up three teams to give better coverage.
“Yes, B is in New Jersey. All the murder victims were found in Long Beach.” The sides of his mouth twitched so violently he almost smiled. “C is offering assistance down in Georgia where some market gardener dug up a few bodies.”
I checked my watch. I really needed to get going. “I’ll write my report then head home,” I said.
“We’ll see you tonight,” Caine said. “How’s Mac coping with the fuss?”
I smiled. “Badly.”
“He’s probably made the connection between speeches and microphones,” Caine said with a massive upper lip spasm.
“I’m sure he has.” There was no stopping the smile on my face. Caine twitched his lips into a frightening grimace. “I don’t know that we’ve helped him any by razzing him about the things he said while under the influence.”
“I think you’ll find it wasn’t ‘we’,” Caine replied, pointing at me, then himself.
“No, it wasn’t you,” I agreed.
Mostly me, with Sam and Lee.
Memories of Mac spaced out on Ketamine, courtesy of the Son of Shakespeare, were never far away. Memories of Mac and his rainbow people amused me on a daily basis; in the main, I kept them to myself.
“Wipe that grin off your face, Ellie. It’s hard enough for him to move past calling Sam ‘Mr. T’ as it is.”
Then I saw it. Suppressed amusement. He did find it funny.
“See you tonight,” I said.
“Let me know if you need a persuasive escort,” Caine said. His voice dropped to barely a whisper. “I’ll have Mr. T and his pal, General Lee, pick him up.”
I imagined Mac handcuffed and escorted to dinner. It was amusing but possibly necessary.
“Will do.”
All names, characters, places, and incidents in this publication are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Killerbyte
© 2009 by Cat Connor
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ISBN: 978-0981425627
First published by Rebel ePublishers 2009
Cover design by Littera Design
Interior design by Caryatid Design
Butterfly graphic © CanStockPhoto/Evgeniia Hulinska