Neither man appeared in the interminable trip up the stairs, across the walkway, and down the steps on the other side, but as she stepped off the curb into the parking lot for the train station, she thought she glimpsed Carlos. Her heart picked up speed—how could she attract his attention? She pretended to stumble, and her captor yanked her back to her feet. A blue van pulled up in front of them, and the back door opened, but before the man beside her could force her in, someone shoved him away. He fell forward, his head slamming into the metal side panel of the van with a crunch and a thud. As she turned to run, Callie caught sight of Carlos attached to his back like a limpet, scrabbling for the guy’s gun.
“Go!” he shouted.
She went. She took the stairs up from the station to the street two at a time, her hurry increasing the nervous tension in those she passed. “What happened?” she heard people call out. “Where are you going? What’s going on?”
Which was a damned good question. Carlos had told her to run. Did that mean they had already rescued Erin?
Cars zipped by along the street at the top of the steps. Where to now? Apartment complexes lined the far side of the street, while her side, the station side, where the land fell away sharply toward the Hudson River, was completely barren. She dodged the traffic and crossed to the lighted apartments, then stood in front of one and pulled out her phone to call Nash. Before she could flip it open, however, the blue van squealed to a stop next to her. The door slid open and two men jumped out.
Callie ducked into the street and fled against the flow of traffic, hoping the oncoming drivers would realize what was happening. Headlights blinded her, and she heard a man curse as he passed. A driver slammed on his brakes, his car fishtailing wildly. A second slammed into him, almost knocking his car into Callie, who leapt to the hood of a station wagon parked alongside. She looked up and down the street, but the blue van was gone.
The two drivers exited their cars, both yelling. The first one pointed toward her, and she clambered down off the wagon. She couldn’t afford to stick around and be recognized by the police. She had entered the country illegally, and her presence would implicate both Mac and Nash, who had done nothing but try to help her. She slid into the shadows as the two drivers progressed from words to shoves.
Just before she reached the safety of the well-lit atrium of a large condo building, she was yanked into an alley. Something sharp pierced her neck, and she looked up into empty black eyes as the light faded from her view.
***
Gasping from having run up the stairs at top speed when he realized—too late—that Callie had taken that route, Mac watched in frustrated fury as the van disappeared around a curve in the road. Fuck. Sirens approached and instinctively he stepped back into the shadow of the trees lining the sidewalk. He needed to get the hell out of Dodge before the media arrived and began filming everything—and everyone—in sight. He began walking down the road in the same direction the van had gone, keeping his pace slow, just another bored commuter, but his hand shook as he yanked the sat phone from its clip on his jeans and speed-dialed Nash.
“I’m two minutes from you. Carlos already called in. He tied up the man he knocked out with the help of a couple of good Samaritans and is waiting for the police. He’ll tell them he saw the guy trying to manhandle a woman into a van and stepped in to stop it. He got the vehicle’s plate number, but these guys are pros; they’ll have new plates or a whole new van in minutes.”
“You think they changed plans when you got Erin?” Mac had been headed toward Callie’s car to tell her that her friend was safe when the train stopped.
“No way to tell. I thought we’d handled it smoothly, but it’s possible Juarez called in before he pulled over and told them there was a problem.”
As Mac rounded the bend where he’d lost sight of the van, Nash’s black town car pulled up across the street. He’d given Nash grief about the sedan, hoping to get a rise out of him, but Nash had merely grinned and said that no vehicle was more anonymous in the New York area than a fleet car. No one paid them any mind in either rich neighborhoods or poor ones.
“Are you tracking her?” Mac belted himself into the passenger seat. With barely a glance out the window, Nash pulled back out into traffic, then pointed at a screen set into the dashboard, where a bright red dot traversed yellow roads.
“Yeah. The van must have gone around the block or something. There’s a huge traffic snarl, and her trackers all stopped for a couple minutes, then started moving again. They’re not that far ahead of us.” He pushed a button beneath the screen, and the image zoomed out, erasing roads but revealing a second red dot. “That’s Dylan.”
“He’s not moving.”
“Nope.” Satisfaction oozed around the words. “That’s how we got Juarez. Nick and Dylan rear-ended him when he got stuck in traffic. They’re in Westchester, not Nassau County, but a couple Nassau cops happened to be passing by and stopped to lend a hand.” Right. Dylan’s family. “Erin seems to be okay, but she’s on her way to the hospital under guard.”
“Where were they headed?”
“Westchester airport. Lexie has been watching flight plans and alerted me to a private flight that came in from Miami. That was the direction Juarez was headed, so we took him out before he could get there. I’ve got a half-dozen guys headed in that direction right now in case either Lewis or Falcone are on hand.”
Mac’s eyes hadn’t left the red dot that symbolized Callie, and when it split, one, dim light breaking away to remain still on the map while the brighter part continued, he cursed.
“They found one of the bugs. Probably tossed it out the window.”
As if on cue, Nash’s cell phone, sitting in a cradle hooked into the dash, rang. He pushed a button, said “Go,” and Lexie’s voice filled the car.
“That was the shoes. Fair assumption if they found one device, they found them all. At least, all the traditional ones. If they have enough men mobilized, they can send them all off in different directions.”
“With any luck, they’ll have kept the op too small for that. Find out what’s going on with Dylan and call me back.” He disconnected.
The little dot took a left. Moments later, so did Nash. Frustrated, Mac wished he had a better grip on New York’s geography. In Atlanta, he’d have known where the van was headed and how to get there first, but here he was lost. Gray stone and cement buildings lined the street they traveled, but unlike those he’d seen in Manhattan, these maxed out at about five stories. Gas stations and bodegas brightened the drab residential landscape, though the deepening dusk and thick clouds leached the vibrancy from even those splashes of color. Night, which stacked the deck against the hunter, was approaching.
The red light turned right. It dimmed, blinked, then went out entirely.
“Shit,” said Nash.
Chapter Sixteen
Callie woke with gritty eyes, a throbbing head, and a tight, unfamiliar collar around her neck. The plastic pinched her skin, and drops of sweat formed beneath it, making her itch. She was lying on a cot in a large, dimly lit space she took to be a basement. Faint illumination leached into the area around the half-open door of a room a few feet away. From the angle at which she lay, Callie could see a sink beyond the door, and she assumed the light came from a bathroom. With that recognition came the urgent need to pee.
She sat up, the pounding in her head increasing as she inched toward vertical. She moved her legs and realized that her left ankle had been cuffed, attached to the leg of the cot by a cable. Lightweight, but very solid. Was this what had happened to the woman from Plum Bay Beach? Could the same cuff have caused the abrasions Mac had described on her ankle? And if so, had Callie returned to the island? Could she have been unconscious so long?
Determined not to suffer the same fate as the Plum Bay victim, Callie squinted into the dim grayness. The faint light limned a neat stack of perfectl
y even loops of cable at the foot of the bed. Stretched straight, it would easily reach the bathroom. First things first. As she stood, hair fell across her face and she reached back, feeling for the tie containing the tracking device.
Gone. Either they’d found and removed it deliberately, or it had fallen off at some point. She still wore her jeans and shirt but assumed her captors had disabled the bugs sewn into them, as Nash had destroyed the one he found in her purse. The gun and its holster, along with her shoes, were missing, which left only the tracker she carried inside her.
Still woozy, she stumbled into the bathroom. The dim light brightened as she crossed the threshold. Motion sensors? Was someone videotaping as well? Did she dare remove the tracker, or would they see?
She peered around the bathroom, searching for hidden cameras before lowering her jeans. She should have kept the skirt. True, it was harder to run in, but it would have provided a modicum of privacy. You have more to worry about than perverts watching you pee. But still she pulled the hem of her shirt as low as she could and huddled over, shielding herself from the view of any potential cameras.
The light remained bright as she washed her hands and splashed water onto her face, but the moment she stepped out of the room, it dimmed. Not motion activated, then. Her fingers traced the collar. Could it be a trigger? Keeping her upper body back, she kicked a leg through the door. No reaction from the lights. Planting her hands one either side of the jamb to stabilize herself, she leaned forward slowly, letting the top of her head, then her face, pass the threshold. The moment her neck crossed into the bathroom, the lights popped back to their brighter setting.
And wasn’t that just peachy? Almost certainly, the collar had other functions, too. She glanced toward the shadowed area farthest from the cot, where she thought she could determine the outline of stairs. The cable wouldn’t reach that far, but even if it did, the collar would almost certainly trigger some punishment, like the “invisible fence” her neighbors had that kept their Labrador retriever from leaving the premises. She shuddered.
She explored the room as far as the cable allowed. Cinder-block walls and the lack of windows declared the spacious, rectangular room a basement. The bathroom, along with dusty boxes stacked just out of her reach, argued for a residential space despite its size. Must be a helluva house. She wished she had a clue how long it had taken to reach the spot, but her watch had stopped at 7:13 p.m., probably as a result of whatever they’d used to kill the tracking devices.
Mac would be frantic by now. Whether he cared about her or not, he would take her capture personally. Especially since they’d been so close to a win. And she had to believe that. Had to believe Erin was safe, protected by Nash’s men.
She took a deep breath and held it for four counts before letting it out slowly. An odd note registered beneath the musty smell of old cardboard and unused space, and she sniffed again. Salt. The house’s climate control seeped into the basement as well, so the air was cool and dry, but the salty tang convinced her that her captors had brought her back to St. Martin.
Again she thought of the unidentified drowning victim. In the madness of the last few days, Callie had come to think of her as a clue rather than a person. But she’d been an individual with dreams and ambitions, friends and family. Had her life ended here, chained to this cot? Her killer had strangled her, which gave Callie a little hope. She’d taken plenty of courses in close-quarters fighting. She’d never tried to engage an opponent with one leg shackled, but the long cable might not interfere too badly. She stood and threw a few tentative kicks. Yes, it could work, though she’d have to take care not to trip.
Of course, her first two half sisters—how weird did that sound?—had been shot. And there was the collar. Who knew what that could do?
If, as she believed, she’d been brought back to St. Martin, it would take Mac hours to get to her, even with Nash’s connections. She needed to get the tracker out, activate it as soon as possible. But what if this wasn’t her final destination? What if she activated the beacon, Mac and Nash got under way, and then John and his cronies shipped her somewhere else? Suddenly cold, she drew up her knees and rocked on the cot, trying to decide what to do.
Footsteps overhead ended the debate. She hustled into the bathroom. When she’d shoved the door shut as much as possible over the cable, she yanked down her jeans and panties and huddled over as if suffering a bout of nausea. Hooking the device with one finger, she pulled it out. She made a production of flushing, then washed her hands in water as cold as she could make it, hoping to activate the bug more quickly. She palmed the device as she headed back into the main room. There weren’t many places to hide the thing, so she pretended to fuss with the shackle on her ankle in case hidden cameras followed her movements as she tucked the bug behind the leg of the cot.
“Hurry up, Mac,” she whispered into the dim, gray space. “Please.”
***
“They’ve taken her back to the island,” Mac said. “I know it.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” Nash countered. They’d returned to HSE headquarters, and Nash had recalled every available agent to work sources and technology. Depressingly few, to Mac’s eyes. They had abandoned Nash’s plush office suite for the seventh floor and a utilitarian warehouse of a room that literally hummed with technology. The low buzz of the computers and the cooling systems didn’t interfere with conversation but added an urgent undercurrent to everything.
Dylan, still tied up with Erin and the NYPD, texted in as often as he could, and they had an open line to Travis in St. Martin, who said John had been locked up in his own house, so no one could be positive he hadn’t left the island. The gendarmes had questioned him in depth when Nicole’s body had turned up and had found nothing incriminating, but he still topped Mac’s shit list.
Two women had responded from the Internet posts and sites Mac had instigated. Both had used the Lewis fertility clinic. One had discovered when her husband had needed a bone-marrow transplant that her daughter was not a match, not, in fact, her husband’s daughter at all. But her daughter had never been harmed; she lived in Virginia with her husband and two children of her own. The other woman hoped Mac could help her—her daughter had disappeared five months before off a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
“It doesn’t seem strange to you that this woman’s daughter, Nancy Rossetti, that she disappeared from Nevis? The e-mail says Nancy told everyone where she was going, that she was over the moon about it. It would have been easy for John to snatch her there. It’s no time at all from St. Martin.”
“You still haven’t explained why he would want to. I’m not buying the inheritance angle, especially if we can’t prove he isn’t the doc’s biological kid. And as for Callie, if she’s down there, she can’t get her hands on the evidence she threatened Juarez with. Why would he take her, knowing all that could become public?”
Mac understood the arguments, heard the logic. But his gut screamed at him to get in the air ASAP. Despite the cool indoor temperature, he could feel sweat trickling down his back. Years undercover, years in the Army, and he never remembered perspiring from fear. He had to find Callie, had to get her back before something terrible happened.
“I think he’s right,” Lexie said from behind him. When Mac turned, he saw she was reading from one of the screens. “Falcone’s company has five cargo flights flying out of New York area airports between seven tonight and midnight tomorrow. Two of them are headed for San Juan. But I’ve also got reports that two of Falcone’s associates have been staying at the Paradis. They landed a couple days ago. Came in commercial. It took us a while to figure out when they bought the tickets, but it turns out they were both last-minute purchases, which I don’t like.”
“Where’s the great man himself?”
“Last seen in Italy, but he’s gone under.” The response came from a man Mac hadn’t met, seated at a computer in the far corner.
“Ten days ago.”
“Find him.”
“Working on it.”
“So he’s got something going down on the island. Maybe he’s involved himself, maybe not.” Nash rubbed a hand over his face. “Either way, we need to be there.” He checked the clock on the wall. “Airfield’s closing. Lexie, get us a pilot and a flight plan for San Juan. Notify Trey we’re coming in tonight and we’ll need the chopper to go back to the island.”
“You get out of there by midnight,” Travis’s voice came across the speaker, “you’ll hit PR at four, the island around five in the morning. Let me know, and The Tramp will be waiting far enough out to avoid notice. You’ll want to do a water drop. It’s quicker, cleaner, and harder to track. Your people can climb aboard.”
“You’re sure you’re not being watched after the last incident?” Mac asked. “We can’t afford the scrutiny.”
“Nope. Nash’s crew handled it. The gendarmes detained them for twenty-four hours, but that’s it. At the moment, they’re running around making asses of themselves and keeping law-enforcement attention focused on them. I should be able to collect you with no problem. If not, I know a couple guys I can trust to do it.”
“Flight plan is filed,” said Lexie. “I’ll drive you to the airport since Dylan’s not available. Saul’s fueling the Cessna.”
“I take it you modified the fuel capacity,” said Mac. He didn’t know much about planes, but he’d never heard of a small jet that could fly so far without stopping for gas.
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