Known Threat

by Kara A. McLeod

  “Ryan?” Rico asked suddenly, taking the decision out of my hands.

  A ragged gasp sounded on the other end of the line, and I cringed and shot him a look equal parts terrified and annoyed. Hadn’t we already established that we couldn’t let Walker know he didn’t have me? What the actual fuck? I didn’t even want to think about what Walker would do when he realized he’d made a mistake. Hopefully he’d see Rory as a bargaining chip of equal or greater value.

  Rico leaned closer to the phone, making it clear in that instant that he wasn’t actually talking to me but rather pretending to talk to me on the phone. That’d been a genius move on his part and made me glad at least one of us was sort of thinking clearly. If Walker thought I was his captive, then he wouldn’t have been surprised that someone would call “my” phone looking for me. I let out the breath I’d been holding.

  “Ryan, stop fuckin’ around,” Rico said into the speaker, adopting a passable imitation of an Irish brogue, which I assumed was an attempt to disguise his voice. “I know you know it’s me. Why you always have to be such a goddamn smart-ass whenever family calls is beyond me. Ma told me to ask if you were going to be able to make it to Aunt Mary’s surprise party this weekend. So, call her and let her know, all right? And if you leave me alone to deal with Uncle Seamus again, I swear to God and all the saints, I’ll drown you in a barrel of Michael Collins and then drink to your passing.”

  Rico and I both held our breaths as we waited to see whether someone would reply. All we got for our efforts was the click of the call being disconnected. We exchanged an uneasy glance.

  Rico and I knew one another well enough to realize that neither of us wanted to give voice to the obvious: it was looking more and more likely that Rory was in Walker’s clutches. My stomach fluttered and writhed, and I tried to ignore the rising panic gnawing away at the inside of my chest, clawing its way up the back of my throat.

  Half dazed, as if in a dream, I picked up the handset to my desk phone and started punching buttons.

  “What are you doing?” Rico wanted to know.

  I finished my task and replaced the receiver in its cradle. “Rolling all the calls for the squad line directly to my extension. If Walker phones back, I want to be the one fielding that call.”

  What I didn’t say out loud was I was afraid of what might slip through the cracks if someone else answered. I was also terrified of what could happen if someone handled Walker the wrong way. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my sister’s fate in anyone else’s hands.

  For lack of anything better to do, I rose from my chair and walked over to the filing cabinet standing sentinel in one corner of the office I shared with Meaghan, who must’ve been out on something because I hadn’t seen her all day. A nice-sized dry-erase board was clinging to the side of it. I plucked it from its rightful place and snagged the cup of markers that always sat on top of the cabinet.

  Then I carefully laid the board on my desktop and took more time and care than necessary cleaning it off, erasing all traces of the notes from another case. Once it was clear, I went over it again with a paper towel soaked with nail-polish remover to ensure no unwanted marker remained. Then I dried it with a fresh towel.

  Rico broke the silence. “So, now I guess we wait, huh?”

  “Guess so.”

  “We’ll get her back, Ryan.”

  “Yeah, but in what condition?” I murmured, allowing a sliver of my terror to bleed through to my words.

  “You can’t think like that. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “No,” Rico said miserably. “I guess you can’t.”

  We sat there in silence, but it wasn’t long before I became restless. I couldn’t breathe. I needed to get up, to do something, to burn off a bit of the nervous energy collecting in my gut. My movements were jerky and quick as I stood, knocking my chair back with a clatter that sounded loud and harsh in the muffled quiet of my office.

  “Where are you going?” Rico looked wary and concerned.

  I palmed my personal cell phone and moved toward the door. “I need to make a call.”

  “Ryan, you can make it here.”

  I shook my head, holding out one hand, bidding him to keep his seat. “No. I’ll just be a minute. Stay. Please. And answer the phone if it rings.”

  Rico nodded, but I barely noticed. My mind was already consumed with the call I was about to make. I shut the door behind me as I left and wandered down the hall toward the window and relative privacy.

  With trembling fingers, I dialed Allison’s number and held my breath as I waited for the call to connect. Tilting my head so I could hold the phone between my ear and my shoulder, I pressed my palms flat against the wide windowsill and leaned my weight on them. My forehead rested against the glass, and I peered onto the street below.

  I took in the people and cars I saw beneath me in a kind of dismal wonder. Life was going on, progressing without a hitch for all of them while my world had been thrown into chaos. It didn’t seem fair to me on any level, and I begrudged them their seemingly easy existences.

  “Hey, baby.” Allison’s voice floated across the line to my waiting ears like a cool, gentle rain on a scorching-hot summer day. I closed my eyes and squeezed them shut against the tears that’d gathered.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I cleared my throat and tried again, but all I managed was a hoarse, strangled whimper.

  “Ryan?” Allison sounded confused.

  “Yeah,” I forced out. “Allison?”

  “Is everything okay?”

  Her immediate concern was touching and somehow made it that much harder for me not to completely break down. I shifted my position so I could hold the phone with one hand and rolled my head so one cheek pressed against the window pane.

  “No,” I choked out, fighting back tears. “Everything’s definitely not okay.”

  “What happened?”

  The lump in my throat made it tough to formulate a response. I swallowed thickly and sniffled. “It’s Rory.”

  “Okay, Ryan. Take a deep breath. Tell me what happened.” Allison’s tone was both tender and firm.

  I did as she commanded and closed my eyes again so I could try to pretend she was there with me, that she was wrapping me in the safety of her arms. I attempted to conjure up the intoxicating scent of her perfume in order to make the fantasy more realistic. It didn’t work, but it did give me something else to concentrate on.

  “Ryan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What happened? Is Rory okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered, as the truth of that statement finally hit me. “I just don’t know.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, Allison. I think…I think maybe one of my PI subjects has her.”

  “Wait. What do you mean someone has her?”

  “PJ took a call. I wasn’t there. I didn’t hear it.” I was borderline rambling now, and my sentences weren’t flowing coherently. “Supposedly it was Walker, but he said he had me.”

  “So, you don’t know for sure that he has Rory?”

  I shook my head but then realized she couldn’t see me. “No. Not for sure. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. He knows what I look like, and she looks exactly like me.”

  A long pause on Allison’s end of the line. “I don’t have any valid argument for that.”

  The sick feeling returned to my stomach, and I rested one hand across my abdomen. “Damn. I was kinda hoping you would.”

  I heard Allison sigh. “Ryan, I’m really sorry. What can I—” A PA announcement declaring that US Airways shuttle 2184 to New York LaGuardia was now boarding drowned out her words.

  “Where are you?” I asked stupidly.

  “I’m at the airport. I’m sorry, Ryan. Can I call you back in a few minutes?”

  “Sure thing. Where are they sending you? Anywhere good?” The question rolled out of my mouth reflexively, b
ut I was sure Allison could hear my heart wasn’t in it.

  Allison hesitated so long I thought I’d lost her. I pulled the phone away from my ear to check. Nope. Still connected.

  “I’m coming to New York.”

  “You are?” Relief overwhelmed me. While I never would’ve even considered asking her to come up, I couldn’t deny how much I needed her here with me.

  “Not to see you,” she said.

  Ouch! That hurt like a punch to the gut. “Oh.”

  “I mean, obviously, I would’ve come to see you. I am coming to see you. It was supposed to be a surprise, actually. I just meant that’s not the underlying reason for my trip.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sweetheart, I have to go. Don’t read too much into it. I’ll explain everything when I get there.”

  I was only half listening to her. Rico was gesturing to me from the doorway to my office, waving his arms and making exaggerated motions that either indicated we had a phone call or something was wrong with his ear and he wanted to lie down on my desk. I was betting on the former.

  A shiver racked me, and I took a shaky breath. “Yeah. Okay,” I said to Allison, much more concerned with the problem at hand than whatever she was up to. “I’ll see you later. Safe trip up.”

  I hung up with unsteady fingers and took one last glance out the window to the untouched world below, wishing I could fall into it and disappear. And then I took a deep breath, set my shoulders, and strode briskly back down the hall to my office.

  Showtime.

  Chapter Ten

  I slid around the corner, skidded into my office, and saw Rico had poised his hand to press the speakerphone button to answer the call. He looked at me expectantly, and I nodded as I threw myself into my chair. I motioned for him to come around to my side of the desk and set about unlocking my laptop so I could type.

  “Secret Service,” Rico said as the call connected.

  “I know this is the fucking Secret Service,” Walker shot back, derision poisoning every syllable. “I called you.”

  Rico and I exchanged a worried glance. I wasn’t positive what he was so concerned about, but my apprehension stemmed from Walker’s inflection. In all my many months of dealing with him, I couldn’t recall a time when I’d ever heard him sound quite this angry. At least not so early on in a conversation. Normally we worked our way up to that. I’d need to tread very lightly in the next few minutes. Lord only knew what would happen to Rory if I messed this up.

  “So you did,” Rico replied, his tone one of forced cheer. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “Don’t play games with me, asshole. I know you know I have her.”

  My fingers flew over the keyboard as I attempted to capture the conversation as it played out for future reference as well as interject the direction in which I thought Rico should steer the dialogue. Rico leaned in to read over my shoulder.

  “Ah, Adam,” Rico said, dropping some of his earlier good humor. “Nice of you to call back. I trust Agent O’Connor is fine?”

  “She’s not gonna be if you don’t let me see my wife.”

  “And by your wife, I assume you mean Zoey Carmichael.”

  “Of course! What are you, stupid? I know she’s talked to you about me. And I know you know that Zoey and I are happily married.”

  Interesting. That was the third time Walker had referred to me since the exchange had started, and all three times he’d refrained from using my name. Was that deliberate on his part? And if so, how could I use that to my advantage? I typed again.

  “You’re talking about Agent O’Connor,” Rico read.

  “Yes,” Walker said venomously. “Her.”

  That was four. So, definitely deliberate, then. I typed some more.

  “Well, now here’s the thing, Adam. I need to be certain you have Agent O’Connor first before I can even think about addressing anything else. And I need to verify that she’s okay.”

  “Are you trying to put pressure on me?” Walker sounded incredulous. I scowled and shifted closer to the phone in a vain attempt to pick up on some background noise that would give me even the vaguest clue where Walker might be. “Because you don’t have any leverage in this situation. I hold all the cards.”

  “Well, that’s not strictly true, now, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you held all the cards, you wouldn’t have needed to kidnap Agent O’Connor in order to force us to facilitate a meeting with Miss Carmichael, would you?”

  I held my breath anxiously as I waited to see how he’d respond. A lone bead of sweat made a slow trail between my shoulder blades and down the center of my back. I wiped at the droplets dotting my upper lip as I tried to control the trembling of my fingers.

  The silence stretched on and on until I was positive I’d go mad. I inhaled so long and slowly I thought my lungs would burst, and still Walker didn’t speak. Terrified now that I’d managed to irrevocably screw up already, I turned to Rico for reassurance. He placed a comforting hand on my shoulder.

  While I waited, I retrieved Rico’s earlier-constructed paperclip chain from the other side of my desk and removed one of the makeshift links. I took my time straightening it out until I had one long piece, and then I proceeded to press the tip of my thumb against one end. Hard.

  “If I let you talk to her, you’ll let me see my wife?” Walker asked out of nowhere, startling us both.

  “It’s not as simple as that, Adam.”

  “Stop trying to confuse me! She does that. She always tries to confuse me.” Walker’s voice had gotten softer and louder in turn as he’d spoken, suggesting he was fidgeting as he spoke.

  “I’m not trying to confuse you, Adam. I just want you to know where I stand on things. I don’t want you getting upset with me later and saying I tried to trick you. Is that fair?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, right now, I want to talk to Agent O’Connor. I want to hear for myself that she’s okay.”

  “Okay,” Walker said slowly, drawing out the word in obvious consideration. “And then what?”

  “Then I’m going to need you to promise me you won’t hurt her. Because I swear on whatever deity you believe in and all the ones you don’t that if you so much as pluck a single hair out of her head, there will be no place on earth you can hide from me. And what I’ll do to you when I find you will make whatever your sick, twisted mind can dream up look like something out of a children’s show. Of that, you can be sure.”

  I blinked, taken aback by Rico’s ad lib. His dark eyes were blazing, his jaw set in a hard line. He was glaring at the phone with fury, and if it were physically possible for him to have reached through the handset and throttled Walker with his bare hands, I think he’d have done it.

  Walker must’ve been surprised, too, because he didn’t say anything for a long moment. And then, “Okay, so I let you talk to her, and I promise not to hurt her. And in return, you let me see my wife.”

  “Hang on. There’s one more thing.”

  “I’m tired of talking to you.”

  “Well, if you don’t talk to me, you don’t see Miss Carmichael, so I suggest you suck it up just a little while longer.”

  “I could just kill her now,” Walker said, his intonation sly.

  “You could. And then you can spend the rest of your days knowing you almost got to see Miss Carmichael, had you only not lost your temper. Because if Agent O’Connor dies, Miss Carmichael will never see you. She won’t even be able to look at you.”

  “That’s not true. Zoey loves me.” The words were shaky, uncertain.

  “That may or may not be the case, Adam. And I’m not here to debate with you about what Miss Carmichael does or doesn’t feel. It’s not my place. But I can say with a fair amount of certainty that she’d never be able to trust you if you killed one of her agents. Is that what you want?”

  “No.” The reply was soft, barely a whisper. I wasn’t even sure Walker was aware he’d spo
ken aloud.

  “Okay. So, back to that other thing I need from you.”

  “What?” Walker sounded like he was pouting now.

  “I’m going to need you to let Agent O’Connor go.”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot? The second I set her free, it’s over for me. I’ll never get to see my wife.”

  “Adam. Let’s not play games. You know as well as I do that you’re going to have to let her go at some point. Why not save yourself a whole mess of trouble and make it sooner rather than later?”

  I heard a faint rustling sound that was likely Walker scratching the stubble on his chin. He did that a lot when he was thinking. “I’ll let her go the minute you let me see my wife.”

  “I’m going to need some sort of assurances.”

  “Don’t trust me at my word?”

  “Not as far as I can throw you.”

  “Hmm. Well, it seems we’re at a standstill.”

  Rico looked at me helplessly, silently pleading with me to tell him what to do. I huffed quietly in frustration as I scanned the transcript of the conversation as it’d already played out, searching for the places where it’d failed to traverse the path I’d wanted. Conversing with Walker was tough enough when I was the one actually speaking. I was finding it a million times harder to try to tell somebody else how to handle him. I pursed my lips and started typing again.

  “Tell you what,” Rico read. “How about you comply with my first two requests as a show of good faith, and you can think about the pros and cons of complying with number three?”

  Silence reigned as Walker presumably considered that suggestion. “I let you talk to her now, and I promise not to hurt her, and you’ll let me see my wife?”

  “I’ll let you have a moment to consider just how much time with Miss Carmichael means to you and whether you think it’s worth Agent O’Connor’s freedom. It’s the best I can do.”

  Walker didn’t reply for the longest time, and I tapped my fingertips together in a rapid-fire rhythm. My heart was thudding painfully, and my mouth was dry. Was it possible that was because I was sweating so profusely? And how could I feel so cold? My skin was clammy to the touch, which I didn’t think was a good sign.