“Adam Royce Walker.”
“What?” Huh. Would you look at that. He’d been right. Even if I’d been given an infinite number of guesses, I still don’t think I’d have come up with that.
Adam Royce Walker was one of our more persistent and dangerous threat subjects. I’d managed his case a couple years ago before he’d decided to relocate himself to DC, but life in our nation’s capital must not’ve been exciting enough for him because he was back now. He and I’d had a brief run-in a few weeks ago, but as far as I knew he’d been relatively quiet since then. Although I had to admit, it was probably tougher for him to communicate with us than usual, considering I’d had him involuntarily committed to the psych ward at Bellevue. Tougher but not impossible.
“I know,” PJ went on, clearly pleased with my obvious surprise. “Crazy, right?”
“Well, I guess it was only a matter of time,” I mused. “He was bound to be released sometime. They never keep him in for long.”
“But that’s not the best part,” PJ said. “Wait until you hear what he wanted.”
“You mean he didn’t call to demand that we let him see Hurricane?”
Hurricane was the code name for Zoey Carmichael, the president’s only daughter and youngest child. She maintained a residence here in the city. Walker was obsessed with Hurricane and entertained any number of varying delusions about his relationship with her. I’d originally been surprised when he’d left New York for DC because Hurricane herself didn’t spend much time there, but as soon as I’d learned he’d gone intending to ask President Anderson Carmichael to grant him his daughter’s hand in marriage, it’d made a whole lot more sense.
“Oh, no, he demanded to see Hurricane,” PJ said with a snort. “But you’ll never believe what he tried to use as a bargaining chip to force the meeting.”
“What?”
PJ paused for dramatic effect, and Rico rolled his eyes. “He said he had you.”
I frowned. “He said what?”
“He said he had you.”
“I don’t get it. Had me? What do you mean he had me?”
PJ laughed. “He said he’d kidnapped you, and he was going to kill you if we didn’t set up a meeting with Hurricane.”
While Walker’s claim amused PJ, a dark feeling of foreboding overwhelmed me. I rubbed my bottom lip with my thumb. Walker was delusional on a frighteningly spectacular level, but he was also eerily smart about some things. Making false claims of this nature—the kind that could be easily verified to then ruin whatever angle he was working—wasn’t his style.
“And you’re sure that’s what he said?” I asked. “You’re sure he said he had me?”
“Oh, I’m sure. He was going on and on about how you were going to pay for what you did to him a few weeks ago, and how he’d show you suffering like you’d never dreamed of. How Hurricane would see this as a display of his dedication and undying devotion to her. I even heard some muffled whimpering in the background. He really went all out.”
“Wait a minute! You just took a call from a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic who’s likely off his medication again, you heard sounds of someone in distress on his end of the line, and you think it’s funny? Where the hell was he calling from?”
PJ’s good humor evaporated in an instant, replaced by uncertainty and dread. He ran the palm of his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I just thought what I’d heard was from the TV or something.”
Rico let out a long, noisy breath as I closed my eyes and massaged my temples with my thumb and middle finger. I was caught somewhere between being aghast and furious that he and I were even having this conversation. “Okay. Did you at least write down the number he called from?”
“I’m sure it’s on my caller ID.”
It was my turn to take a deep breath. “Go look for me, please.” I may’ve configured the words in the form of a request, but my tone left no doubt that it was a command.
PJ hustled out of my office, and I lowered my hand from my forehead, trying to ignore the fact that it was trembling. My insides felt like so much Jell-O, and I couldn’t shake the gnawing sense of trepidation worming through all that gelatinous goodness.
“What do you think is going on with Walker?” Rico asked.
“I have no idea. This isn’t like him at all.” I mulled over the situation as I understood it, attempting to figure out what to do next.
“Do you really think Walker has someone?”
I ripped out my hair tie in a fit of pique and ran my fingers through my hair in frustration. “He has to. But who? And where is he keeping her? How did he get her there in the first place?”
“And why is he insisting it’s you?” Rico wondered.
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I don’t know.”
“I mean, you were his case agent for what? A year? A year and a half? How many times during that period did you meet with him? He knows damn well what you look like.”
“Exactly. I think he must—” Something hit me just then with all the subtlety of an Acela train at the peak of a DC to New York run. The unexpected force of the realization knocked me back, and I leaned heavily against the backrest of my chair. I couldn’t believe how long it’d taken me to reach the most obvious conclusion. My bile rose, thick and cloying, to coat the back of my tongue. “Oh, my God.”
Rico’s brow wrinkled with worry. “What? What’s the matter?”
“Rory.” No, that was crazy. Wasn’t it? No way could some lunatic manage to snag my sister off a busy New York street. I mean, those sorts of things didn’t happen in real life. Right?
“What about her?” Rico eyed me with confusion for a long moment before comprehension settled in. “Oh, shit. You think Walker has Rory?”
I nodded as the unease roiling in the pit of my stomach alchemized into full-blown panic. I’d really wanted him to tell me how ridiculous that theory was, but judging by his expression, I suspected I was about to be on the receiving end of yet another painful lesson on how we can’t always get what we want.
“That would explain why he told PJ he has you,” Rico said, the words falling from his lips with great reluctance. “He thinks he does.”
“Fuck,” I muttered, my heart stopped.
I scratched my neck and then ran my palms across my thighs. Okay. I needed to think. I couldn’t let fear distract me. Hell, I wasn’t even one hundred percent positive Walker actually had Rory, so there was no sense in getting all fired up until that theory was confirmed one way or the other. As my dad would say, I shouldn’t invent things to worry about.
I pushed back from my desk and stood so I could prowl the room as I mentally sketched out a plan. My insides felt ice cold, and a vague dizziness tickled the back of my awareness. Possibilities and options swirled in a chaotic mass in my mind, fogs of anxiety I tried to dispel occasionally obscuring them.
“Okay,” I said aloud, only half talking to Rico at that point. “Obviously, something is making Walker think he has me. It’s probably best for whoever he may have to let him go on thinking that, which means I can’t talk to him. Until we have him in custody or until we have whoever might be with him safe with us, you all need to play along. Act as if you can’t find me, and you’re worried.”
“Ryan, I am worried.” His voice was soft, his tone anguished.
Hearing the concern and angst coloring his words generated some huge cracks in my carefully constructed veneer of calm. I swallowed and cleared my throat, buying myself some time in order to repair them sufficiently so I wouldn’t completely crumble.
PJ scuttled back in, his eyes wide. His face indicated he was halfway toward having his own panic attack. If the situation weren’t so potentially dire, I’d have felt bad for him. As it was, I could barely refrain from screaming at him to get the hell out of my sight.
“Please tell me you have a number for me,” I all but begged him.
PJ wordlessly handed over a piece of paper. The number scrawled on it was written in a shaky hand a
nd was nearly illegible. It was yet another physical testament to just how upset PJ was about the metaphorical ball he’d just dropped.
“Thanks, PJ,” I said, taking care to keep my intonation deliberately bland. “We’ll take it from here.”
“Ryan, I—”
I glanced up from the paper to fix him with a dark glare, cutting him off. He was staring at me with sad puppy-dog eyes. Okay, that made me feel a little bad. I sighed, rueful he felt so distressed and aggrieved that I needed to worry about his feelings at all in the middle of this nightmare.
“PJ, just go. Please. Rico and I will take care of this.”
“What can I do?” PJ pleaded.
“Can you go ask Jim who’s been handling Walker’s case since he got back to town? I’d like to know how long he’s been out and see how he’s been cycling lately.”
The logical choice for that honor would’ve been me, seeing as how I’d handled the case when Walker was in New York before. But I’d been on light duty because of “the incident” and was therefore technically not supposed to be working any cases. Plus, I was on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and none of the JTTF reps carried any Secret Service cases. They were too time-sensitive, and the bosses had never wanted to chance that we wouldn’t be available to devote the necessary attention to them. Better to leave that to the guys who didn’t have outside-agency responsibilities to worry about.
On the bright side, that system had left me free to concentrate on my terrorism-related investigations. On the down side, it meant I knew next to nothing about what’d been going on with Walker since his return. That left me at a severe disadvantage. I wanted to rectify that and level the playing field as quickly as possible.
PJ nodded and left without another word, and Rico and I sat in silence for a while, each lost in our own thoughts. My mind was racing, considering and then discarding a multitude of courses of actions. Taking care of this situation with Walker—I still refused to actually think the words “getting Rory back,” as though the thought alone might have the power to make that necessary—was going to be a lot like playing chess. Before I directed each move I wanted my guys to take, I’d need to consider all the possible reactions Walker could have. Just like when playing the game, I’d have to make allowances for each move after that in succession, on and on until neither of us had any moves left. To say that it wouldn’t be easy would be a colossal understatement.
Anxiety hit me hard, and I struggled to tamp it down just enough so I’d be able to function. Nothing good could come from me completely losing my shit. I’d figure this out. I had to.
“Ryan.” Rico gently broke into my thoughts.
“Hmm?”
“Do you want to call one of the other guys in the squad over to talk about this?”
“No. Not yet. I’ll brief them as soon as we’re completely committed to our next move, but I don’t want them here yet. Not until I’ve had a minute to process this situation.”
“Are you sure you want me here?”
I favored him with a look I hoped expressed how ridiculous I found that question. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
Rico’s brows knitted, and he fiddled with the paperclip chain in his hands. He paused, obviously tussling with his next words. “I’ve never been in PI. I’m not sure I even remember what to do with a PI subject. Especially not one like Walker. What if…What if I do something wrong? What if…?”
My heart melted. I understood his apprehension. This situation could go pear-shaped in at least a million different ways, none of them pleasant. It entailed a lot of responsibility, having someone’s life in your hands like this. The fear of fucking up, knowing the consequences of even the smallest of mistakes, was daunting.
“Rico, look at me.” I had to wait a few seconds for him to comply, but I was patient. I needed him to see the sincerity in my eyes when I spoke. “You’re going to be fine. We are going to be fine. I know Walker better than anyone in the Service. And I’m going to help direct you every step of the way.” I hoped my bravado was enough to convince him. It wasn’t quite enough to convince me.
“Okay,” he said, almost resignedly.
“Rico, you’re like a brother to me. There’s no one I’d rather have here with me. You know that, right?”
Rico nodded solemnly, and for the first time in the history of our relationship, I regretted all the times I’d jokingly told him to be serious about something. I could’ve used a double shot of his wry humor right about then. I’d have to remember to be careful what I wished for.
Chapter Nine
Rico and I spent the next hour or so discussing the pros and cons of various courses of action and trying to prioritize our goals in order of importance. It wasn’t easy, seeing as how we didn’t agree on those points.
That we needed to pinpoint Walker’s exact location, well, that was a given. But we were divided on whether we thought that took precedence over determining if Walker even had someone at his mercy and whether that someone was Rory. I’m sure you can guess where my priorities were.
“I still say we need to run a trace on both phones,” I told Rico for what felt like the tenth time.
“That might not give us what we want,” he insisted. “There are too many variables for that to be a viable option. Rory’s phone needs to still be on, and it needs to still be on her person. Same thing with the phone for the number PJ gave us. If it’s a burner phone and he ditched it, it does us no good.”
“I disagree. Even if it is a burner phone and he dumped it, we can glean valuable information from that. We can track it to where it is now and pull video surveillance from any surrounding cameras to see what direction Walker went after it was dumped. We might even be able to track him via camera to his current location. Same with Rory’s phone. We can figure out where the phone is now. If he does have her”—I was still clinging to the extremely unlikely chance that we’d run this trace and discover she was safe and sound at her apartment or the hospital where she worked—“and even if the phone is off now, we can figure out where it was pinging when he took her. That’s something.”
“Ryan, even if what you’re saying is true, and we can track the phones and they do give us some place to start, it’s going to take too long to run the trace. Rory hasn’t been missing long enough for anyone to commit to that sort of measure. We need to call the number PJ gave us and see if he answers.”
I’d thought of that, actually. His point about Rory not having been missing long enough and the reluctance of anyone to initiate a trace on her phone without proof that she was, indeed, in some kind of peril was valid. But I thought I had a solution for that. I’d just been reticent to discuss it with him.
Hurricane’s soon-to-be-ex detail leader, SAIC Claudia Quinn, had several high-level contacts in the Counterterrorism Division of the Department of Homeland Security. One phone call from her to the chief of the Counterterrorism Division of the Assistant United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was all it took to get that particular ball rolling. She’d assisted me with something similar a few weeks ago when I’d been attempting to get to the bottom of who’d shot me. All I had to do was ask, and I’d have the information I needed within the hour.
But this wasn’t exactly a terrorism matter. The last time I’d solicited Claudia’s assistance with an issue like this, it’d been after what had, on the surface, looked like an assassination attempt on the president of Iran. Even if what she’d done for me had come out in the media, no one would’ve been able to argue that she was within her rights to exercise that power to get to the bottom of the plot in order to verify no one else was in danger. Now, however, the waters were a little murkier.
That Walker insisted on a face-to-face audience with Zoey Carmichael as a condition of Rory’s safe return was a point in our favor. No one could blame Claudia for pulling out all the stops to ensure the safety of the president’s daughter. On the other hand, Hurricane wasn’t in any real jeopardy at the moment, an
d therefore taking such drastic measures was unnecessary. I sighed, torn with indecision.
“Okay, how about this?” I attempted to compromise. “I’ll call Rory’s phone from my work cell, which has a blocked number. We’ll see if it’s at least on. If it’s not, then we can wait about fifteen or twenty minutes and do the same with the number PJ pulled from the caller ID. We’ll put it on speaker so I can hear the voice to see if it’s him, but pretend to be a telemarketer or something. Hopefully that won’t get him too hinked up.”
I didn’t have the guts to say aloud what I knew we were both thinking: that things could go very badly for Rory very quickly if Walker became the least bit suspicious. But I couldn’t see any way around it at this point. I was out of ideas.
“And then what?”
“And then, once we’ve determined as best we can whether the phones are on and if someone actually has physical possession of them, I’ll get us the traces we need. We can go from there.”
Rico thought about that plan for a moment. He nodded once. “Okay. It’s probably the best we’re going to do.”
I inhaled shakily and held my breath as I dialed my sister’s number with trembling fingers. My heart was pounding, pumping pure anxiety through my veins at an unprecedented rate. I felt ill.
It took an eternity for the phone company to establish the connection, but eventually, after several long, tense heartbeats, the room was filled with the sound of a tinny ringing.
I sagged, flooded with the smallest measure of relief. I still wasn’t sure whether Rory was safe, but at least her phone was on. Even if it got turned off now, we could still trace this call and get at least that much closer to where she was right this second.
I had slid my thumb over to the “end call” button to disconnect when the ringing stopped as someone answered. No one spoke, and I froze, uncertain what to do in the face of an open line.
Several long seconds dragged by, and the longer we sat there, the more panicked I became. Shit! If it really was Walker on the other end, he could react very badly to this deviation from his carefully planned script. I needed to hang up now.
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