Kill Chain

by Meg Gardiner

The voice was silken and smutty. I looked at Tim, my heart thumping. He mouthed, Them?

  I nodded. “Who is this?”

  “Tell that ugly maniac with you, he will pay for Boyd. And if you ever again come close to hurting my son, I will kill you myself.”

  A sour taste bloomed in my throat. The voice was plummy, like fruit so ripe it was beginning to ferment. The phone made a new sound, the chirp of a photo arriving.

  “Take a look.” She hung up.

  Heart racing, I brought up the photo on the screen. My stomach hollowed. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again. The picture was still there.

  It was Dad. His hands were bound behind his back, and a gag was drawn tight in his mouth. Tears swam into my vision. His face was battered, one eye swollen purple. Blood was matted in his white hair.

  Tim gestured. “Here.”

  I handed him the phone. He grunted.

  “Dark background, no way to tell where he is. And no time stamp. You can’t tell how recent it is.”

  A drone rose in my head, and my brain shifted from overdrive to neutral, losing traction. The phone rang again.

  Tim put a hand on my arm. “No tears. No begging. Hold your bottle.” He handed me the phone.

  I blinked away tears, cleared my throat, hard, and answered, “Bitch.”

  “If you want your father back you will not involve the police, because the second you do, they arrest you for killing a federal agent. Then you go to jail and your father dies. Cunt.”

  “I want to speak to him.”

  “Let’s skip the clichés. I want the Riverbend file. Every record Jakarta Rivera kept on the operation, from Colombia and Thailand.”

  Gooseflesh crept across my arms. Her voice felt like mud sliming over me.

  “If I turn over this information, you’ll release my dad. Correct?”

  “I do not mean memos or handwritten notes. I mean DVDs. Video records.”

  I glanced at Tim. “I don’t have DVDs.”

  “Get them. You have seventy-two hours.”

  “Deadlines are a cliché. Forget it.”

  She laughed. “You misunderstand. This is not my deadline. I am finished with him. It’s up to you to get to him before he dies of dehydration.”

  I stared vacantly down the road. The voice carried the ripple of a distant shore, and sounded even more smug and self-satisfied than it had before.

  “You deliver the Riverbend files and I’ll tell you where Phil is. This is simple. You’re already running out of time.”

  Blood and bruises, gag in his mouth. Hands bound, no food, no water, no way to even wet his mouth without that dirty cloth absorbing all the moisture. He’d been ambushed yesterday. He could be anywhere from a cave in the mountains to a stifling shack in the Nevada desert, sweating out his life under a baking sun.

  “How will I get the information to you?” I said.

  “Write this down.”

  She rattled off a phone number. I grabbed a pen and wrote it on my wrist.

  “That’s a message phone, and untraceable to me. And so you won’t go shouting to the authorities, let me tell you: Your father is no angel.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You need to care. When you get a look at Riverbend I don’t want you freaking out. And I want you to understand why you don’t want the cops obtaining the file. Phil is no Mr. Clean.”

  “Fine.”

  She laughed, a sound full of sex and malice. “You think he was John Wayne. He was a procurer. Back when your big thrill was letting some high school boy stick his tongue in your mouth, Phil was using whores to gather intelligence for him.”

  I stared out the windshield. “Tell me something useful, or I need to go.”

  The laugh sounded worse this time. “Your father is in enough mierda without the world learning he had women work on their backs for the CIA.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “Seventy-two hours. Your daddy is getting thirsty.”

  She clicked off, leaving me gazing at roiling clouds and the empty street. Tim put a hand on my arm.

  “DVDs,” he said.

  “In seventy-two hours or he dies.”

  “What about Jax?”

  He looked pale and seemed to have honest-to-God pain in his eyes.

  “She didn’t mention Jax.”

  He slumped lower in his seat. Then he blinked, shoved his emotions back behind the wall, and pointed at the dossiers. “I’ve never seen any DVDs. But there’s a small envelope in one of those folders. It has a key inside.”

  Rifling through the material, I found it. The envelope was labeled SINNER’S PRAYER. Inside was a handwritten letter. Taped to the letter was a small red key with the number 357 stamped on it.

  “Where’s the safe-deposit box?” I said.

  He gestured to the letter. I unfolded it.

  Looks like I got a losing hand.

  I tried to rise, baby, to ride it right to the top. But you win again. If I’ve done somebody wrong, it’s myself.

  Maybe one day I’ll see you, but for now I gotta hit the road. Let me be.

  J.R.

  1821 Century Park East

  Los Angeles

  “It’s a code, isn’t it?” I said.

  He leaned on the steering wheel, peering at the letter, his face rough with concentration.

  “Is it encrypted?” Anxiety began spinning up. Did we need a mainframe computer? A linguist? Indiana Jones?

  He shook his head. “It’s a simple code. The address is real.”

  “Century Park East is Century City. It’ll be an office building.”

  “Then it will be a private bank.” He reread the letter, half-aloud. Though he looked focused, his intensity seemed to be ebbing. “Got it.” He blinked, grimacing again. “We go to the address and decipher the rest from there. The second sentence is the key.” He glanced at me. “Unless you can think of a title I’m missing.”

  “I’m blank.”

  He tapped the letter. “The second sentence is the only one that’s not a song title or lyric.” Nodding, almost smiling. “Jax, you beauty.” He looked at me. “Rhythm and blues. Don’t you know Ray Charles?”

  “Obviously not well enough.”

  “ ‘Sinner’s Prayer.’ ‘Losing Hand.’ ‘You Win Again.’ All his songs.” He gave me a look of disbelief. “Come on—‘Hit the Road, Jack.’ ”

  “Okay, that I know.”

  “ ‘Let me be’—that’s a line from ‘Unchain My Heart.’ Simple. You just have to know Jax. The only one that doesn’t fit is the sentence about rising, riding to the top. That’ll be the clue.”

  I looked at my watch. Four ten p.m. Without traffic, Century City was ninety minutes in a fast car. During rush hour it could be a nightmare.

  “Let’s go.” He got out of the car, grunting. I got my backpack, stuffed the manila envelope back inside, and followed him toward the red SUV.

  “Tim, you go get the file. I won’t run. And certainly not in a stolen vehicle.”

  He took keys from his pocket and flicked a remote. The lights flashed on the red SUV. “This isn’t a stolen vehicle. It’s mine.”

  “I have to go to the police.”

  “That’s not going to work.”

  He turned all the way around to face me. Shock twanged down my arms. He had unzipped his jacket, and beneath it he was bleeding.

  “Oh, no.”

  I walked toward him. Gingerly he pulled his jacket farther open. His shirt was sticking to his left side, and there was a ragged hole in the fabric. His serrated expression had worsened, and I saw that he was very pale. I put my hand under his elbow.

  He held out the keys. “You drive.”

  I helped him into the car. “We have to get you to the hospital.”

  “This is how it is, love. I can’t possibly go into a private bank like this. You have to do it.”

  “You need immediate medical attention.”

  He glanced again at his shirt. It was soppin
g. “The shot was through-and-through. It didn’t hit anything vital.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “If you take me to a hospital and turn yourself in to the police, Jax and your father will die.”

  “Why?”

  “The only way to get to Rio Sanger is through Riverbend, and the police must never see that file. The information it contains could prove deadly to Jax and your father.”

  “We need to trust the cops. Tim, the entire law enforcement apparatus isn’t corrupt. You may have gone freelance, but that doesn’t mean that everybody else is a bad guy.”

  He gave a brief, eerie smile. “Your faith in democracy is touching.”

  “So’s your cynicism. But right now you’re being unreasonable. And you’re bleeding to death.”

  “There’s no time to argue. You need the Riverbend file.” He grabbed my wrist, his grip fierce. “You have to do this. You can’t fail. If you don’t get the information to Rio, we’ll never see Jax or your father again.”

  I blinked back the stinging in my eyes.

  He held hard to my wrist. “You only have a few hours before the cops figure out who you are. I don’t know how they’ll play it—accomplice or my hostage. Either way, they’ll issue a BOLO with your name and photo. Once they do, your room to maneuver shuts down.”

  He turned my wrist so we could see my watch. “Six p.m. Get the information by then or you won’t get it.”

  Nodding in distressed assent, I jumped in the driver’s seat and fired up the SUV. I peeled away from the curb and tore down the winding street. Live oaks blurred by.

  “When I get this file, we won’t simply hand it over to the kidnappers, will we?”

  “No. We’ll do more.”

  He eyed me. He didn’t need to say the word he was thinking.

  Revenge.

  7

  Police cars blockaded the street. Black-and-whites, officers and detectives moving around beyond them, and an ambulance, lights flashing. People clotted the sidewalks. Jesse screeched to a stop and clambered out of the truck.

  Damn it to hell. He pushed through the crowd. Beyond the patrol cars in the intersection sat the white car he’d seen gunning away from Evan’s house. Cops and paramedics were working on someone in the road. Someone dead.

  A policeman passed by, talking into his radio. Jesse called, “Officer.” The man didn’t look up.

  His head was pounding. He had heard Phil’s message too late. He couldn’t see past the patrol cars. Who were the cops working on in the street?

  He knocked a fist against the patrol car. “Hey. I need to get through.”

  The cop on the radio turned around. The man’s eyes pinged with recognition. “What are you doing here?”

  Great. It was Officer You-can’t-walk, from last night. Jesse pointed at the scene. “My girlfriend’s in there.”

  The cop walked toward him. “Back up, buddy. What are you talking about?”

  He heard somebody call his name. Drew Farelli, from the U.S. Attorney’s office, was striding toward them, phone to his ear.

  “Drew.” Jesse pointed at the intersection. “I saw that Mercury outside Evan’s house. It went after her.”

  Farelli nodded at the cop, pulling out an ID. “It’s okay, Officer.”

  The cop jerked his thumb at Jesse. “You know this guy?”

  “Yes.” Farelli squeezed his pudge between two patrol cars, catching the cop’s mistrust. He nodded to his phone call. “Yes, Nicholas. Right away.” He hung up. His expression was harsh. “Let’s get away from this crowd.”

  Jesse felt completely cold. Farelli put a hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off.

  “Stop it. Drew, is that her?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Relief lit his vision like a magnesium flare. He nodded and rubbed his knuckles across his forehead, momentarily mute.

  “Evan’s not here,” Farelli said. “She drove off with the shooter.”

  He looked up. “What?”

  “You saw that car chase after her? Why did it do that?”

  “What do you mean, drove off with the shooter?”

  Farelli’s cocker spaniel face was bright red. “The driver of that car was shot in the head. Your fiancée not only witnessed it, she got in the killer’s vehicle and drove away with him afterward.”

  He blinked. Hell. Tim North.

  “There’s more. SBPD found something in the victim’s car.” He walked around the front of the patrol car with Jesse following, and called to a member of the forensics team. “Higgins. Got that jacket?”

  The forensic tech nodded and held up a sealed plastic evidence bag. Inside was a blue windbreaker with big letters printed on the back: ICE.

  “Know what that means?” Farelli said.

  He knew, but there had to be an explanation.

  Yeah. Tim North was a stone killer. Phil Delaney had lived a black life that led to this. He himself was too late. And Evan was screwed.

  Farelli crossed his arms. “Till now I thought Evan was just being loyal to her dad. I gave her the benefit of the doubt because I thought you were a straight shooter. That’ll teach me.”

  “Drew, Evan’s in danger. We have to find her before she gets hurt.”

  Farelli shook his head. “People saw her get in the car, voluntarily, and flee the scene of a murder.”

  The street was wet, gleaming with sunlight. From this angle he could see the victim’s legs. Dirty jeans and heavy boots, splayed on the road. Meat puppet. He looked away.

  “That’s a federal agent over there. One of us.” Farelli pressed his lips together, fighting emotion. “This one we take to the wall. Murder and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. The DA’s applying for a warrant. In about half an hour Evan is going to be a fugitive.”

  “Farelli, that’s ludicrous.”

  “This won’t stay local, either. That was Nicholas Gray on the phone. The U.S. Attorney’s office will seek to charge her with murdering an officer of the United States government. You think you’ve seen my boss on the warpath, you have no idea.”

  “Drew—”

  “Find Evan.” Farelli turned and walked away. “This afternoon. She turns herself in or she’s toast.”

  Jumping lanes on the 405, I hopscotched through afternoon traffic heading up the hill through the Valley, nearing Century City but not nearly fast enough. Tim coughed. Barely audible, he muttered, “Bloody hell.” His skin was the color of candle wax and sweat was beading on his forehead. He had the phone to his ear again, his fifth call since we left Santa Barbara. He was arranging for someone to get him medical treatment, out of the spotlight.

  He hung up again and dropped his hand to his lap. The Percodan he had taken from his first-aid kit seemed to have soothed his nerves but not his pain.

  “Time to talk about when we get there,” he said.

  “I go in, get the file, we call Rio.”

  I glanced at his phone. He was holding it tightly, keeping the line open for his contact to phone in. I was itching to grab it. The sun, smearing through hazy air, popped against the sea of vehicles slurring along the freeway. The SUV rumbled up the Sepulveda Pass out of the Valley.

  “If things go wrong”—he grabbed a breath, pain pricking his features—“there’s five thousand dollars cash stashed in the spare tire. You take it.”

  “Why?”

  “If you have to run.”

  I wrung my hands on the wheel, foot heavy on the accelerator.

  “And dump Davies’s phone. Use pay phones, or get some new mobiles if you have time. Pay-as-you-go, and use top-up cards.”

  He shifted in his seat. A coppery smell reached me, the odor of blood.

  “When you get out of this car, trust nobody. And I mean nobody. Rio has more thugs like Boyd Davies. Presume she’ll try to track you and get the information from you, violently if necessary.”

  I nodded, my stomach tightening. “Rio’s son is in on this too. That must have been him in the black designer outfit.
”

  “Christian. Heir to the family empire.”

  “When I spoke to Rio it sounded like she has a foreign accent.”

  “She’s not American, but she operates here now.”

  “What do you know about them?” I said.

  “What I’ve told you. I’ve never met them. Riverbend happened before Jax and I met.”

  “What’s in the file?”

  “I don’t know. Just that the operation ended disastrously. And that your father is the one who got Jax involved in it.”

  Traffic flowed sluggishly through the afternoon sun. We needed to go faster.

  “I’m not dumping Davies’s phone yet,” I said. “That photo is the only evidence we have that Dad has been kidnapped. And I want to get a look at his phone book and call records.”

  “Don’t get caught with it on you.”

  “I won’t. But I need to do something right now.” My face was heating; he wasn’t going to like it. “I’m calling Jesse. Give me your phone.”

  He shook his head.

  “You know how you felt when you realized you couldn’t get hold of your wife?” I said. “That’s how Jesse’s feeling right now. I have to let him know I’m all right. And if I can’t trust anybody once I get out of this car, I need a lifeline back home. Especially if things go wrong.”

  He sliced a look my way, but handed it over.

  Jesse slammed through the door into the foyer at Sanchez Marks. He needed to talk to Lavonne. They had to form an assault plan, deal with the cops and the U.S. Attorney’s threats. And find out what the hell was actually going on.

  “Jess.”

  He glanced over his shoulder, past the big window that looked down onto the street, at the sofas in the reception area. “P.J.”

  His brother stood up, rubbing his palms against his legs as though wiping off sweat. “Got a minute?”

  Not even a second. He opened his mouth and closed it again. P.J.’s face was earnest, searching him for signs of annoyance.

  “Sure, a minute. Come on.”

  P.J. jogged to catch up. He jammed his hands in the pockets of his jeans, seemed to hunch into his shirt. Along the hall people walked past, staring. Jesse knew it wasn’t because he and P.J. looked alike, or because his colleagues were pleased to see his brother.