by David Archer
Gabriel smiled at her. “I give you my word,” he said, “I won’t kill him unless it’s absolutely necessary. Now, call your daughter and tell her to stay away, that it was a joke and you will talk to her tomorrow. Say that it was one of your guards playing a prank, and that you have fired him.” He held the phone out to her.
Alexandra looked at the phone for a moment, then took it and dialed quickly. It took her almost a minute to convince her daughter that everything was all right, but then she promised to see her in the morning and said she was going to bed. She ended the call and handed the phone back to Gabriel.
“As long as they don’t show up tonight, they’ll be safe. Unfortunately, I cannot give you the same courtesy.” He tossed the phone to Bill, then pointed the pistol at Alexandra’s head and pulled the trigger. He watched her lifeless body fall back on the bed, then picked up the brass from the floor. “Let’s move,” he said. “I want to be gone in sixty seconds.”
They hurried down the stairs together and were out of the house and across the backyard in half a minute. Nick helped Bill and John get over the fence, and then he and Gabriel scaled it on their own. They were in the van with John behind the wheel and already driving away only eighty seconds after he had executed Alexandra.
TWENTY-ONE
Michael had left the library when his phone rang, and returned a few minutes later. Neil was still sitting at the table, looking at the chessboard.
“Well,” Michael said. “Sounds like things are going pretty well. That was the boss, and they just wanted to check and make sure you’re doing okay. I said you were fine, except for beating me at chess all the time.”
“Checking up on me in the middle of the night?” Neil asked. “Besides, I’m not winning all the time. You won a game earlier, just after dinner.”
“That was nine games back,” Michael groused. “You know, you could at least let me win now and then, just to keep my ego from getting too deflated.”
“I don’t care about your ego,” Neil said. “I care about winning.”
Michael grinned. “I just told my boss, I hope this whole thing turns out well. I like you, Neil, and I wish we could be friends.”
Neil looked at him, carefully keeping his face neutral. “Yeah, well, we’ll see how that works out for you. I don’t usually get too chummy with people who hold me prisoner.”
Michael held up a finger. “Okay, in my defense,” he said, “I was only assigned to be your host and make sure you don’t get hurt. I had nothing to do with abducting you, remember that.”
“I’ll try,” Neil said, grinning despite himself. “I’ll admit, under other circumstances you might not be that bad.”
* * * * *
Jenny had merged onto I-70 nearly an hour before, and decided to stop at Grand Junction to grab some coffee and use the restroom. She pulled in at a large gas station, glanced at her fuel gauge and decided to fill up before she left.
The place was like a truck stop, and a large sign announced free Wi-Fi. She took care of her business in the restroom, then grabbed a large coffee and sat down in one of the booths. A moment later, she had the subcom log on to the Wi-Fi network.
“Jenny to Noah,” she whispered.
“Noah to Jenny, I’m here.”
“Any answers yet?” Jenny asked. She was sitting with her eyes closed, silently praying for some good news.
“Team Angel has a lead on where Neil is being held, but it’s going to take a little time before they can get to him. Jenny, they’re going to get him back. They got a CIA strike team backing them up, so it’s time to call this off and come on in.”
“I’m sorry, Noah,” she said softly. “I can’t do that until you can tell me that he’s safe. I know you don’t really understand, but he is only in danger because of me. I cannot leave him there without doing everything possible to keep him safe. If that means I have to turn traitor, then so be it.”
“Jenny, this is Sarah,” a new whisper cut in. “Please, Jenny, listen to Noah. If you come in now, we can let this whole thing blow over. Angel will get Neil back, you just got to have faith.”
“Sarah, I learned a long time ago that the only one I can have faith in is me. Believe me, I really don’t want to hurt Allison, and I was really hoping that Noah could come up with a way we could fake it, but I cannot call it off until I know Neil is safe. I’d rather die trying, and I’m fully aware that Noah is going to be waiting to try to stop me. Hell, I would be if I were him, and no hard feelings if you manage it, Noah. I just have to do everything possible for Neil.”
“Noah to Jenny, I do understand. How many times have you seen me do whatever it takes to get Sarah back? If I were in the same position as you, I might do the same, I just don’t know. How far out are you?”
“I don’t think I want to tell you that,” Jenny said. “At the moment, Noah, you’re the enemy, remember? No matter how much I love you guys, I know that you have to do everything you can to stop me. I really don’t think I want to be giving you any clues about when to expect me.” She took a sip of her coffee. “I’m gonna sign off now,” she said. “Good luck, Noah. Try not to get in my way, please? I really don’t want to hurt you.”
She turned off the subcom, then walked up to the fuel desk and handed the clerk a pair of twenties. She moved her car over to the fuel island, then pumped in thirty-six dollars worth of gas, shut off the pump and drove away. She was back on the interstate a moment later, less than three hours from Denver and only five hours from Neverland.
* * * * *
“This is Jason,” came the voice through the phone.
“Charlie Butler,” Gabriel said. “Remember me?”
“Sure, Charlie,” Jason said. “How did your appointment go?”
“Went pretty good. Got what I was hoping for, and now I need to get together with those friends of yours. How soon can you help us out?”
“Let me make a couple of calls,” Jason said, “and I should be able to get them rounded up within an hour. Any idea where the party is, yet?”
“Yeah, it’s about four hours out. We need to get there as soon as possible, because we left a mess behind that could blow up in our faces. If the people at the party find out about it before we get there, they might be sticky about letting us in.”
“I can take care of the mess,” Jason said. “I’m going to text you an address, where you can meet my friends. Like I said, it’ll probably take an hour to get ready, but they might have a faster bus available. I’ll do my best for you, Charlie, so don’t forget it.”
“Trust me, I won’t,” Gabriel said. “And by the way, I really did like those party favors you brought us. I don’t suppose you have any refills for them, do you? I just about used mine up.”
“Yeah, I thought you’d like those. I’ll send along some refills, but don’t forget to get them to my buddies when you get done with them. My boss would have my butt if he knew I let them out of my sight.”
“Okay, send the address. We’ll meet your friends in an hour, and I sure do hope their bus is faster.”
“I think it will be,” Jason said. “I’ve heard stories that say it can really fly.”
Gabriel ended the call and looked at his phone. It signaled an incoming text message a moment later, and he opened it to find an address. He showed it to John, who was behind the wheel. “That’s the address where we are supposed to meet the crocodiles,” he said. “We got about an hour before they get there, but we might as well head that direction.”
John nodded and punched it into his GPS, then looked at Gabriel. “Says it’s about forty-eight minutes. I’ll drive just a bit under the speed limit, try to avoid drawing any attention.”
“You do that,” Gabriel said. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes, grabbing a few moments of rest while he could.
They made it to the rendezvous point without incident, and it turned out to be an old construction yard. It was well off the beaten path and some distance out of the city, a great place for a
clandestine operation to launch from. There was no one else there, yet, so John parked the van off to the side and they sat there to wait.
Ten minutes later, they heard the familiar whump-whump of helicopter rotors, and the big bird settled to the ground just a few yards in front of them. A half-dozen soldiers were out of it only a second after it landed, and one of them jogged over to the van. He approached the driver’s window, and John rolled it down.
“Is one of you a Mr. Burke?” he asked.
Gabriel leaned closer. “I’m Charlie Burke,” he said. “You must be Jason’s friends?”
The soldier grinned. “He likes to think so,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Jennings. Come on with us, we got word that this is a high-priority mission, and our bird is a lot faster than this thing.” He stood back while they climbed out of the van, then walked around to Gabriel. “I’m supposed to give you this,” he said. He took a small box out of his pocket and handed it to Gabriel, who looked inside to see a dozen of the flat nosed bullets for the PSS.
Gabriel grinned as they followed the lieutenant to the helicopter, then took a seat and strapped himself in before he took the pistol out and reloaded it. The extra bullets went into his pocket, and the pistol went back into his waistband.
“You got GPS coordinates for us?” Jennings asked loudly, to be heard over the sound of the rotors idling overhead.
It was Bill who answered. “I do,” he said. He took a piece of paper from a pocket and handed it to the lieutenant, who passed it to the pilot. The pilot glanced at it, and nodded vigorously to indicate that he knew where he was going. Jennings slapped him on top of the helmet, and the helicopter lifted off the ground and tilted slightly as it began moving.
“It’ll be about forty minutes,” Jennings said to Gabriel. “We’ll put down about three miles from that point, then ride in the rest of the way.”
“Ride in?” Gabriel asked. “You got a car slung under the belly of this thing?”
Jennings grinned. “No, but we got something almost as good. You’ll have to wait and see.”
Gabriel looked at him for a moment, then leaned his head back. Might as well try to get a few more minutes of rest while he could, he figured.
* * * * *
“She’s here by now,” Noah said. “She has to be.”
Allison sighed. They were sitting in her office on the top floor of the headquarters building, and she glanced at the clock on the wall. It was getting close to two in the morning, and she hadn’t slept in more than forty hours. “Do you honestly think you can stop her? We trained her, remember? One of the things that makes her so effective is that she always manages to find a way past any obstacles.”
“Allison,” Donald Jefferson said, “there are a dozen security guards in the building, Marco is in the hallway outside, and Noah is right here with you. I don’t think there’s really much chance that she’ll be able to get in here and kill you.”
“Not if I can help it,” Noah said.
“She’s doing what she has to do,” Allison said. “When we let her and Neil start a relationship, we never thought about the possibility that he could be used against her this way, at least not to send her right back here after me. Who could have predicted something like this? It doesn’t matter, though, because she’s going to do whatever she feels she has to do to get him back. If that means killing me, then…”
“Then she’s turned into a rabid dog,” Jefferson said vehemently, “and will have to be put down like one. Noah, if she gets past the rest of them, you put a bullet through her head!”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Noah said, “but that’s exactly why I’m here. And if it comes to it, I will.”
Allison slammed a hand down on her desk. “Stop it! I’ve told you over and over, if I have to be killed as a mission imperative, then so be it. Noah, as long as it is only me she targets, you will stand down. Do you understand me?”
Noah looked at her, and after a moment, he nodded. “Understood,” he said. “I will take no action as long as you are the only target.”
“But…” Jefferson began, but Allison cut him off.
“Donald! No one knows how to follow orders, do you?”
Jefferson stared at her for a long moment, then lowered his eyes. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I do.”
“Then, you will be preparing yourself to take over, just in case this turns out unpleasant for me. If you need to leave the room, feel free to do so.”
His eyes still locked on hers, Jefferson slowly shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I would prefer to remain here.”
In his head, Noah heard Sarah let out a sigh. He had insisted she stay at the house during this, but the only way she would agree was if he promised to keep his subcom on so that she could hear everything that was happening.
* * * * *
Jenny had rolled into Kirtland twenty minutes earlier, and parked the Mustang behind Charlie’s restaurant. She took the bags of clothing she had purchased behind the dumpster and got dressed, putting on the loose, baggy clothing and pulling the old gray wig over her head. She had applied makeup earlier, adding dark circles under her eyes and hollows to her cheeks that made her look quite a bit older. The glasses only added to the effect, and she started to walk toward the headquarters building.
Then she stopped. Charlie’s offered free Wi-Fi to its customers, and she realized that it was probably on twenty-four hours a day. She thought about it for a moment, then activated the subcom and logged on to the Wi-Fi network.
“Jenny to Noah,” she whispered. “Tell me something good.”
“Noah to Jenny. Team Angel is working on locating Neil now, and should have an answer soon. You still have time, Jenny, come on in and work with us on this.”
“Sorry, Noah,” she said. “I can’t, not just yet. If I don’t deliver proof that Allison is dead, then I’m signing Neil’s death warrant. He wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for me, so I have to do whatever it takes to get him out of it.”
“Jenny, don’t do this. You know I can’t let you go through with it.”
“Wow, Noah, it almost sounds like you honestly care. I know, I know, you just don’t want to see the kind of problems this is going to cause, but I have to do whatever it takes to get him back. I don’t want to hurt anybody else, Noah, so please, don’t get in my way.”
She cut off the subcom before he could respond and started walking down the alleyway behind the restaurant. She cut east another block, then went down the alley between the buildings over there. In the baggy clothes, she looked like one of the homeless people that seemed to appear in every town, and even Kirtland had its share. She didn’t figure anyone who noticed would pay much attention, at least as long as she was this far away from the HQ.
When she was directly east of the office building, she climbed onto a dumpster and managed to snag a fire escape. She pulled herself up onto it, and then moved up the stairs until she reached the roof. She walked to the edge that was closest to the headquarters building and looked over. There was a street and another building between where she stood and the headquarters, so it was time for all those hours of running parkour to finally pay off. The building across the street was two stories shorter than the one she stood on, so she went back to the other side of the roof and took off running. When she launched herself off the edge, she had enough momentum to make it across the street and land just on the edge of the lower roof.
The impact knocked the wind out of her, and she lay there for a couple of moments to catch her breath. When she was confident nobody had noticed or heard what she had done, she got to her feet and then grimaced. The pistol on her hip had left what she was sure was going to be a good sized bruise, but she didn’t have time to worry about it at the moment. The sooner she got this over with, the better the chance that she might one day be with Neil again, and that was all that mattered to her.
The building she was on was separated from the HQ building by a wide alley, but the headquar
ters building was ten stories tall. Noah would be expecting her to come through the parking garage or just bull her way through the front doors, but she wasn’t going to do anything he might expect.
For some reason, the city had stretched a cable from a pole on the roof of this building across to the one that housed Brigadoon Investments. It had something to do with safety for city workers, but Jenny didn’t care what its purpose was. All that mattered to her was that it was likely to be able to hold her weight.
She took off the outer baggy clothes, then shinnied up the pole and got her hands on the cable, then swung her legs up over it. She spidered her way across upside down, hanging more than fifty feet over the alley below, moving slowly and steadily. The clothes she had worn underneath were dark gray, much better than black if one was trying to blend into the nighttime shadows, but if anybody happened to look out the window it was always possible the movement would register in their peripheral vision. She wanted to get across as quickly as she could, but she didn’t want to move so quickly that it would draw attention.
Only a few feet to go, she thought, but then she heard a grating noise and felt the cable give a jerk. Her eyes snapped forward and she saw that the bracket the cable was attached to was actually pulling its bolts out of the brick. Three of them were already loose, and only one still seemed to be secure. She started moving more quickly, but the added vibration made two of the loose bolts fall completely out, and then the last one suddenly pulled free of the brick.
Fifty feet above the ground is a lousy place to find out gravity still works. She made one last lunge just before the cable gave, and the forward momentum was just enough to let her catch the rail of the balcony on the third floor with one hand. She hung for a moment, absorbing the pain in her shoulder and wondering what kind of idiot would want one that overlooked an alley, then thanked her lucky stars that somebody had put it there. She swung up her other hand and got hold of the rail, then pulled herself up onto the balcony and sat on it to catch her breath once again.