Into the Crossfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  The bright point that was Nicole, or rather her hard disk, slowed and turned into the industrial area around the docks. “Now where the hell—”

  “Sam.” Mike put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “I just called dispatch. They couldn’t contact the two officers, so they’re assuming it’s an officer down situation. A patrol car is on its way to Nicole’s house, be there in five, but it doesn’t look good. I think they’ve been eliminated and I think this McInerney has Nicole’s dad. She’s heading straight for him.”

  Sam stood, mind churning. He was known for thinking fast in the field but right now horror froze him. He never went into battle afraid. You couldn’t go into battle afraid, it was like signing your own death sentence. Warriors make their peace with death right from the start, and go into battle with a free mind.

  Terror gripped him, made him clumsy and slow. McInerney had been to SERE school. It was meant to train soldiers to withstand torture, but it was run by sadists who loved their work just a little too much. And though soldiers were taught to resist, they were also taught how to beat information out of anyone, even the strongest man.

  Sam knew the methods and he simply couldn’t bear the thought of them being applied to Nicole. To that soft, gentle, beautiful woman. Or—God—to her father. A sick, dying man. If this Sean had hired himself out as a contract killer, there wasn’t going to be anything stopping him, no moral line he wouldn’t cross.

  Maybe the fuckhead might even enjoy it. Enjoy inflicting pain. Enjoy listening to Nicole scream…

  Sam closed his eyes, sweat rolling down his face. He simply couldn’t deal with it.

  He was a good strategic thinker, but right now he had the strategic IQ of a rock. His head was filled with clamoring noise, with visions of Nicole laid out on a table, being flayed alive.

  Attached to electrodes. Being waterboarded. Fingernails pulled out one by one. Violently raped…

  Sam turned swiftly and vomited into a trash can, emptying his stomach of its contents, but not his mind of its nightmares.

  Mike frowned. “It’s bad, yeah. You really shouldn’t have sent the two special agents away. You could have had the resources of the FBI on your side and you just let them go.”

  Sam wiped his mouth and picked up his body armor, the one without the Kevlar core to keep the weight down. He had no idea if he’d have to climb or maneuver. It was always a trade-off—weight against agility. Right now, being able to move easily trumped having a bullet penetrate the armor.

  He started pulling it on. “Okay, so the Feds have enormous resources, but what’s their top priority? What’s the one thing they want?”

  “Got it.” Mike’s jaw worked. “Sean McInerney.”

  “Who’s ex Special Forces. He’s not going down without a fight. However much the Feds will try to make it go down without collateral damage, their number-one goal is McInerney. If we give them Nicole’s location, they’re going to go in with a full tactical team, no holds barred. Do the math. Maybe twenty men, one hundred rounds each, that’s two thousand rounds that might be fired in the space of a few minutes. There’s going to be a firefight, with Nicole and her dad caught in the crossfire. If it’s just me, I know what my priority is, and it’s getting Nicole and her dad out alive—” He stopped for a second and looked Mike and Harry in the eyes. “And offing this guy. I want him dead. I don’t want him to testify or to stand trial. I want him gone.” Sam turned to Harry. “Don’t take your eyes off that monitor. Where are they now?”

  Harry leaned over and checked the monitor. “Still heading south.” Harry leaned over and touched the screen. “You can intercept them here if you hurry. Take the SUV.”

  Hold on Nicole, Sam thought, moving out, moving fast. I’m coming for you.

  New York

  He looked out his thirty-fifth floor window, at the sweep of Manhattan at his feet. Night had fallen, the skyscrapers were lit up like a false dawn. Cars and taxis made their way through the streets like a restless, irritable, illuminated worm. Something was holding up traffic uptown and the northbound lanes were stalled. At street level, Muhammed knew, horns would be blasting, drivers and cabbies would be sticking their heads out the windows and screaming obscenities. Time was money and lost time was felt as keenly as the pickpocket’s nimble fingers filching your wallet.

  The energy and the power of the city was like a strong wind. It could blow you away like a mote of dust if you didn’t know how to resist its lures.

  Muhammed could. Easily. There was nothing here that didn’t fill him with hatred and disgust.

  The women, in particular. Wall Street was full of them now, with their mannish ways and full-out aggression.

  He had grown up in a culture where women dropped their eyes, never looking a man full in the face. He remembered vividly when he had turned from a boy to a man. How the street women who had yelled at him, cuffed his ears, suddenly avoided him, spoke to him softly, if at all.

  The women in Manhattan would eat a man alive, if you let them. They were casual mothers and wives, discarding husbands and children like unwanted clothes, but deadly serious about money.

  Monsters, not women. And Allah, through his servant Muhammed, was about to punish them.

  His view took in the entire harbor, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and in the far-off distance, the slow swells of the Atlantic Ocean. The direction from which vengeance was coming, at sixty knots.

  Each day was a gift from Allah, and it was a sin to wish a gift away, but Muhammed ached for the day after tomorrow. Only the sternest self-discipline kept his face placid with the bankers, hedge fund managers, CEOs he dealt with daily. Inside, he was exulting. He could see an empty, desolate Manhattan so clearly—smashed windows, grass growing up through cracks in the sidewalks, loose newspapers fluttering through the streets—it confused him that there was still traffic clogging the streets, people walking on the sidewalks, office buildings lit up with workers making deals far into the night.

  Soon, so soon, it would all be over, the heart of the Great Satan punched out.

  And he—Muhammed Wahed—would have done this. For his people and for his God.

  Chapter 14

  San Diego

  The van pulled out from the parking lot so fast the tires burned rubber. Had it not been the dead of night, Nicole could have hoped that the speed would have attracted some attention.

  Or she could try buzzing down the window and screaming at a passing car. Make noise. Wrench the wheel and cause an accident.

  Do something. Resist.

  But they had the highest bargaining chip possible—her father. Who was right now terrified and no doubt in blinding pain, held in a hidden location. The only path to her father ran through this large, cold man sitting beside her.

  And probably she wouldn’t have been able to do anything to escape this man, anyway, even if he and the intruder weren’t holding her father hostage.

  The driver was vigilant. His eyes tracked from the inside and outside rearview mirrors to the road ahead, to her, ceaselessly, in a constant loop. There was only a mere second between glances, there would barely be enough time for her to bunch her muscles for a move, and he’d notice that.

  No, her only hope would have been to attract the attention of someone. But there was no one around. The man in the van had waited for the taxi driver to drive off before leaning down to turn on the ignition. Nicole had watched the taillights of the cab disappear with despair. There had been no chance whatsoever to communicate with the taxi driver. The phone had been open during the drive and then she’d had to get into the car with the new man and her phone had been destroyed.

  It had been her last hope—that maybe Sam could somehow trace her through her cell phone. In the movies and in the thrillers she loved to read, a cell phone was like the bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel. In NCIS, Tim could trace cell phone signals down to a couple of square feet, and he could do it in the blink of an eye.

  If Tim McGee could do it, Sam Reston could. Of
that she was certain. If anyone could track her down, it would be Sam.

  But not even Tim McGee could track a smashed and dead cell phone and even if by some wizardry he could, she wasn’t there anymore. Sam would track her down to some smashed bits of plastic and metal. The cell phone had been destroyed and she was hurtling through the darkness with an unknown man to an unknown destination. The only thing she was certain of was that they had hurt her father and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. She sneaked a glance at the driver.

  He was driving fast but well, like Sam. He shared other attributes with Sam. Tall, though not as tall as Sam, very fit, with the gift of stillness and a strong aura of self-control.

  But there, of course, the similarities ended. This man gave off menacing vibes by the ton. No doubt Sam could do that, too, but she didn’t think he could do that with a woman. And she couldn’t—by any stretch of the imagination—imagine him hurting a sick old man.

  Where the hell were they?

  Nicole tried to keep track of where they were going, with some vague idea of stealing a cell phone, surreptitiously phoning Sam and providing him with an address.

  But by the fourth squealing, stomach-churning curve, Nicole was utterly and completely lost. She had no idea what direction they were traveling in and she didn’t recognize anything about her surroundings.

  They were near the ocean, that’s the only thing she knew. They were on a straight stretch of road now and at the cross-roads, to her right, she could see a glint of moon off coal-black water. It didn’t help her. San Diego was nothing but coastline.

  They were in some kind of industrial section, only run down and deserted. She imagined a functioning port area to be busy day and night, loading and unloading the ships that arrived and departed on an hourly basis.

  This place had mile after mile of derelict warehouses and industrial plants behind chain-link fencing, the buildings low and utterly dark.

  Nicole sneaked a glance at the driver’s hard face, then looked away. She had no sense at all that she was in a car with another human being. He could have been a robot-driver for all the emotion he betrayed.

  She tried to steel herself for whatever was coming, but waves of panic rolled over her. Even trying to make some kind of a plan—how could she, when she had no idea what was going on?

  The driver was not the man who had attacked her. So there were at least two men involved. Two very hard, criminal men. Where there were two, there could be three or four. There could be an army. It didn’t make any difference. She’d been powerless against one. She couldn’t hope to hold her own against two. If there were more, it didn’t really make that much difference.

  There was absolutely nothing on her person she could use as a weapon. Whatever they wanted from her, they were going to get.

  “Where—” Nicole’s mouth was so dry her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She shuddered and tried again. “Where are we going?”

  Ahead of them the empty road stretched, dark buildings on either side. Nicole would have no trouble believing that she and robo-driver were the last humans on the face of the earth.

  Silence.

  She licked her lips and tried again. “Where are we going?”

  Somehow, not knowing where they were racing to added another layer of horror to the situation. If only she knew where they were going, she could, she could…

  What?

  “Here,” robo-driver growled and turned a corner so fast she had to cling to the seat belt.

  “Shit,” Sam growled, banging his hand on the steering wheel. “Can’t go any faster.”

  He was pushing 90 mph as it was. He just hoped he didn’t run into any cops, because he wasn’t slowing down for anybody. It wasn’t that the SUV couldn’t go any faster—he’d clocked it at 140 mph on a racetrack—but rather that Harry was triangulating their relative positions. Harry observed the path of the vehicle carrying Nicole and had to calculate the best, fastest way for Sam to get there. It was a complex piece of geometry and Sam had to be able to take a corner on a dime when Harry said.

  Mike wasn’t paying him any attention. He was staring at the small screen set in the dashboard, listening hard to Harry through his earpiece. Sam was getting the same intel over his.

  Mike acted as navigator, quietly telling him two minutes before he had to turn a corner. If they’d been traveling during rush hour, they’d both be dead in smoking ruins by now.

  “Turning left onto Spring Road,” Harry said. “Where the fuck is he going? There’s just nothing there but…” His voice trailed off.

  “But warehouses,” Mike finished for him. “I thought that might be where he’s headed.” His mouth pressed into a thin, grim line. Sam met his eyes briefly, then gave his whole attention back to the road.

  “Not good,” Mike said quietly.

  No, it wasn’t good. It was a section of town destined for demolition. A new residential complex was supposed to go up afterward, though the plans had been halted due to the real-estate crisis. In the meantime, it was an area of derelict warehouses and abandoned buildings. Empty, for miles. Guaranteed privacy, for as long as they wanted. No one would ever hear Nicole screaming…

  He pressed the accelerator just a little harder.

  “Target stopped,” Harry announced quietly into their headsets.

  Mike pointed to the screen. “We’re about ten minutes out.”

  “Where, exactly?” Sam asked, eyes on the road.

  Mike leaned forward, frowning at the map on the screen. “Turn right.” The tires’ squealing sounded loud in the night’s silence. “Left.”

  A straight stretch. Sam nudged it up to 110 mph.

  “Coming up,” Harry’s voice came over the headset. “Got it?”

  Sam flicked a glance down at the grid on the laptop screen on the console, where a blipping light was stopped. It wasn’t on the road, but inside an outline. “Got it. What the fuck is it?”

  “They’re inside a compound. Don’t know what security measures they’ve got set up, though. You and Mike be careful.” Harry’s calm voice sounded loud in Sam’s ear.

  “That’s a whole row of condemned buildings.” Mike ran his finger over the street. The map showed long rectangles of buildings separated by alleys along the waterfront. “You got the number?”

  “Says here 3440.” Harry’s voice was low, calm, but Sam could hear his fingers pounding the keyboard. “It was—yeah, coming up now. Formerly a bonded warehouse. Company moved out in ’oh six.”

  “There was a big bust there,” Mike said grimly. “Arms for cocaine. SDPD bagged a couple of real bad guys. That was before Sam set up shop here, before my time even.”

  No one to hear her scream. Sam’s hands tightened on the wheel and he pressed down on the accelerator. They were going so fast it took all his skills to keep the SUV on the road at turns.

  They were on a straight stretch, only a few minutes out. Sam started slowing down.

  “Kill the engine…now,” Harry ordered, and the vehicle drifted soundlessly forward until it came to rest at the curb of a cross street, about ten feet from the street where the car with Nicole had gone in.

  The SUV was still rocking when Sam shouldered the driver’s-side door open, ready to leap out. A strong hand held him back.

  What the fuck?

  “Goddamnit Mike, Nicole’s in there.” Urgency rippled through his veins, prickled his skin. Right now, someone could be hurting Nicole, cutting her, burning her…“Let me go,” he snarled.

  “Wait,” Mike said calmly. “We need more intel.”

  Sam swallowed. He knew this. He knew this on an intellectual and theoretical level. You do not go blind into a situation. But, shit, Nicole was in there now and Sam felt like jumping out of his skin with urgency. He was panting, the sound loud in the dark cabin of the vehicle.

  Mike pulled his head around and went nose to nose with him. “Listen up here, I know you’re worried, but I’m not going to let you fuck this up. I like Nicole, too. And th
e best way to bury that beautiful woman is to go in guns blazing without knowing the terrain or even where they are.”

  “Blueprints of the building coming up…now,” Harry said into their earpiece. The screen darkened, then lit again with the blueprints of an industrial complex.

  “See?” Mike said. “There’s at least sixty thousand square feet there. How the fuck you think you’re going to find them? By following bread crumbs?”

  Sam and Mike stared at the screen. Sam sure as fuck hoped Mike was taking it all in, because he wasn’t. A high keening sound rattled in Sam’s head, the sound of panic. He had the classic symptoms. His heart raced, his palms were sweaty, he could barely focus his thoughts, he didn’t have a sense of his own body, only of imminent danger to his woman.

  This wasn’t helping Nicole.

  He leaned his head back against the headrest, pressing against it hard, and wiped his mind, concentrating on his breathing, trying to repress the very clear, spotlit image he had of Nicole being hurt that made his heart trip-hammer.

  Breathing slowing, heartbeat slowing…

  “Welcome back,” Mike said quietly.

  Sam opened his eyes and just like that, he was back. Capable and cool, the operator he’d always been.

  Panic would get Nicole killed. She was already in serious danger. He was the only thing that stood between Nicole and death. If he didn’t get himself under control, she was fucked, and he would lose her.

  Sam leaned forward. “How many points of entry?”

  Mike looked at him intently for a second, eyes bright blue even in the low glow of the monitor, then nodded. “Seven,” he said. His finger pinpointed the doors into the building. “Plus what could only be a big loading bay here.”

  Sam turned it over in his head. “They won’t be using the loading bay. Those suckers have huge doors that take forever to open even if you find the control panel. They’ll go in through one of the side doors. They’re on some kind of timeline. Whatever it is they’re doing, it has to be quick.”

  Mike nodded. “Makes sense. And I don’t think they’d go far into the building, so we’re looking at perimeter rooms.”