It rang, and the Homeland response desk operator picked up. “Special Agent Dan Gable, badge 52317. Code orange, repeat orange, Metro park-and-ride at Backlick Road, Springfield.”
“Standby,” the operator said. Dan heard a click, then elevator music. Surreal. He bounced his leg impatiently, replaying the surveillance video to see if he’d missed anything the first time through.
The phone clicked again, and the operator came back online. “Units rolling, Agent Gable. Please pass details when you can.”
Dan described the situation. He took pains to avoid mentioning that the suspect was Deputy Director Tom Jarvis. It was best to sidestep any bureaucratic confusion, and let the operators do their job unencumbered by worries of blowback based on the perp’s elevated administrative position.
“Request you direct emergency speed,” Dan finished. “The suspect is fleeing from a sabotage and arson scene with three dead FBI agents, and he threw a package into a trash can at the park-and-ride.”
Dan heard the operator relay his message to the lead response vehicle via radio in the background. “ETA?” he asked.
“Thirteen minutes, sir.”
“Not fast enough. Chopper?”
“That’s the thirteen minutes, sir. The cars will be there in about twenty-five minutes.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re a stone’s throw from downtown.”
“The chopper’s departing from Andrews now, sir.”
Dan had forgotten that they’d moved the response team’s air support arm to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. It was just a few miles further away, but it made a difference in this case.
“Okay. I’ll try to control the area. Please call the FBI to coordinate. They technically have the lead on this pursuit.”
“Then technically, we can’t respond without their approval.”
“Not true. Life-and-limb clause.” Dan was referring to the carte-blanche that allowed all emergency services to operate across jurisdictional lines to prevent imminent public injury or death. “We’ll apologize later if their panties get bunched up over it.”
“Shouldn’t we also involve the Metro PD in that case? Seems like they’d be closer.”
Dan cursed. There was significant risk that the Metro cops who responded would be part of the ring of VSS traitors who had spent the week chasing Sam. On the other hand, if he directed the operator not to contact the local police, and something bad happened that could have been avoided with more on-scene manpower, there was no way he would be able to stand the heat. Worse than that, his conscience would tear him up for years.
“Yeah, please call Metro, too,” he said reluctantly.
Dan hung up and dashed outside of the security office, sprinting toward the trash can containing Jarvis’ package in order to establish a safety perimeter. It was a quarter mile from the security kiosk.
Dan was thankful that the parking lot was mostly empty. If it had been a weekday, the lot would have been filled with commuters making their way home from the city.
But the parking lot wasn’t completely abandoned. Dan’s heart leapt into his throat when he saw a young mother pushing a stroller near the far corner of the lot, not more than a dozen feet away from the trash can containing Jarvis’ package.
“Ma’am! Stop!” he shouted. “Please stop walking! It’s not safe!”
He was too late.
A bright flash erupted, followed by wall of heat and a thunderous explosion. Dan instinctively hit the pavement and covered his head, feeling the lick of flames and the attack of debris shards against his clothing and skin.
The shock wave had barely passed when he leapt to his feet again, charging toward the site of the explosion, hoping against hope that the young mother and her child had somehow survived.
He couldn’t help thinking of Sara and his own kids as he dashed down the row of cars toward the source of the smoke and debris. Auto parts, garbage, and shards of glass lay strewn about.
Something caught his eye as he flew past. He turned to look. It was a stroller wheel, still attached to its support, but torn completely from the stroller by the force of the explosion.
Dan stopped running, his throat suddenly burning with grief and choked rage. Jarvis, I will kill you if it’s the last thing I do, he vowed.
Dan sped northbound into the city, driving the dead FBI agent’s cruiser as fast as it would go, lights blazing and siren blaring.
It had taken him a while to compose himself after the grisly explosion at the parking lot, but he hadn’t waited for the cops to show up to secure the scene. He’d simply jumped in Phinney’s car, radioed back to the FBI, and used his burner phone to contact the Homeland emergency response dispatcher.
The dispatcher filled him in on the latest in the Jarvis pursuit. Metro PD officers had stopped the northbound train in between two stations along its route, sealed off the cars, and conducted a car-by-car search. The operator mentioned a fortuitous event: there happened to be four Metro cruisers in the vicinity, and it took very little time for them to arrive and begin searching the train.
Handy little coincidence, Dan thought.
Dan wondered aloud when the FBI had arrived to search the train, and the answer was telling: Metro had already searched four of the twelve cars when the FBI response team arrived.
“Let me guess: they found nothing,” Dan said glumly. The operator’s affirmative response confirmed his suspicions.
So Jarvis has Metro help, he concluded.
But it wasn’t a conclusion he was yet willing to discuss openly and indiscreetly. It was best to have found the smoking gun before accusing the police department of such a serious breach of the public trust. He decided to take a different tack.
“Can you tap into the commuter rail security footage remotely from your terminal?” he asked the dispatcher.
“Not directly, sir,” the operator said. “But I can conference with the on-call cyber specialist. I’m sure they’ll be able to view the footage.”
“Have them assemble every second of footage they have on the northbound train that left the Backlick station at 6:29 tonight. And I do mean everything, including things like storefront and warehouse security cameras that might have caught the train passing by, things like that.”
“Sounds like a big job,” the operator observed. “When do you need it?”
Dan stifled the urge to ask whether the operator was mentally challenged. “With a murderer on the loose?”
“Sorry. I’ll have them call the entire team in right away. Is there anything else?”
As a matter of fact, there was. Dan asked the dispatcher whether Special Agent Sam Jameson had phoned in anytime recently.
He was afraid he already knew the answer, and he wasn’t wrong. “Nothing from her, sir,” the operator told him.
“Write this number down,” he said. He pulled his burner phone away from his face, futzed with the call log menu while driving with his knees at over a hundred miles an hour, and shouted Sam’s burner number at the operator. “Run a full trace, even more quickly than the video footage.”
He ended the call by charging the operator with calling him the instant she had an update. Things had taken an extremely ugly turn over the past hour, and Dan had the feeling that more bad news was on the way.
He drove over the crest of a hill and caught sight of the flashing police lights adjacent to the stopped train. He had nothing better to do than to join the search of the commuter cars, but he already knew the effort was futile.
Tom Jarvis was long gone.
38
Sweat poured from Sam’s brow, and her hair hung in damp strings across her face. The pain came in waves, and the short, stocky sadist had learned how to adjust the depth and duration of the electric shocks to maximize her pain while preventing her from enjoying the relative respite of losing consciousness.
The current caused her muscles to contract, and painful, bloody trenches formed in her arms and legs where the metal restraints held her fast. In a strange
ly surreal detachment, Sam heard the sound of her own screams as if they came from someone else, muffled by the oversized, electrified steel ball stuffed in her mouth.
Sam mustered the strength to raise her head and look at Brock, and she regretted it instantly. He had reawakened after passing out from the pain of his broken foot, and he was watching every agonizing second of Sam’s torture at the hands of the vicious little man. Tears of helpless rage streaked his face, and she could see him struggle to breathe as his midsection sagged. He was still strapped horizontally to the wall by his arms and legs, and the awkward position of his body forced his diaphragm to fight against his own weight to draw each breath. He would suffocate slowly, she knew, dying only after his abdominal muscles had destroyed themselves trying to keep him alive.
In the meantime, he watched helplessly while Sam slowly met her own grisly demise. Close your eyes, baby, she urged him silently. Don’t watch this. Nothing says you have to watch. She blinked at him, telling him she loved him, telling him it was okay if he had to let go before she did.
Her tormentor stepped in between them, something shiny in his hand. A blade.
Fear penetrated her exhaustion yet again as the man stepped toward her. Her insides twisted, and she wretched as she felt his tongue on her naked body.
Deep and slow, the first cut caught her by surprise. The pain was excruciating, unbearable, intense and horrific in a totally different way than the electrocution. Her body twisted and writhed, fighting against the inexorable strength of the clamps holding her fast to the wall, and the man responded with more pressure. The blade dug ever deeper, and she heard her own otherworldly howl again.
She felt warm liquid dripping in frightening quantity down her leg, then the warmth of the demon’s tongue as he lapped at her blood. He pulled away long enough to smile at her, streaks of crimson on his lips and teeth.
Then he brought the knife to her skin again.
She locked her eyes on Brock’s, praying for the end to come quickly for both of them, but knowing with grim, apocalyptic certainty that it would not.
39
Dan had a conversation with the FBI agent in charge of the manhunt, and he left convinced that the Bureau was more than competent enough to handle all but the toughest fugitive situations.
Unfortunately, Jarvis had proven himself to be far more than just an average fugitive. Dan’s earlier assessment of the man – that he was a milquetoast bureaucrat, castrated by his years behind a desk doing everything possible not to make waves – had proven woefully wrong. Jarvis had shown himself to be ruthless, cunning, and brazen.
And frighteningly well prepared. David Phinney’s torso had been vaporized by a close-range shotgun blast, and the other two agents had died a fiery death as incendiaries detonated all through Jarvis’ vacation home on the river.
Jarvis had then executed a nearly-flawless escape, utilizing the anonymizing effects of public transportation and the stultifying effects of creating multiple crime scenes to cover his retreat into oblivion. Bombs and casualties soaked up manpower, as the task force had to stabilize each new scene he created, leaving fewer agents immediately available to continue the manhunt.
And Jarvis had wisely chosen to hop on a crowded train, knowing that searching each car for clues to his whereabouts would take further time and resources.
And then there was the Metro Police Department connection. Dan had personally processed the computer evidence linking Jarvis to the crooked cops. He was certain that the cops’ clandestine duties would undoubtedly include helping to extricate Jarvis from the immediate vicinity, and spirit him away to safety, out of view of Homeland and the FBI. After all, Jarvis himself had paid the Metro guys handsomely.
Dan harbored no delusions that the swarm of agents and police officers that had descended on the train and the two bombing scenes would find a hot lead pointing to Jarvis’ whereabouts, and he racked his brain trying to anticipate Jarvis’ next move.
Where would I go if the cops were helping me get there?
The answer that popped immediately to mind wasn’t a happy answer: Any damn place I pleased, and nobody would stop me.
As the DHS chopper circled overhead, Dan concluded that Jarvis was long gone.
The burner phone in his shirt pocket buzzed. He answered the DHS operator’s call.
“Two updates, sir,” she said. “First, the cyber team has the transportation system video copied and cued up for you to see, but they’re still working on gathering the other video feeds with a view of the train or its passengers. That part could take a while, they said, maybe even a couple of days.”
“Thanks,” Dan said. “I have another tasking for you. Find out how many Metro PD cruisers have departed any of the three scenes, and find out where they went.”
The emergency response operator was silent for a while, then said, “I’m not sure how to even get that one started, sir.”
“Start with their dispatch desk. Be sure to involve their Internal Affairs team. Mention something called Operation Bolero. That should get the ball rolling nicely.”
Then his stomach twisted as another thought struck. “What about that trace on Special Agent Jameson’s phone?”
“That’s the second update,” the operator said. “Was she in Venezuela? We thought they were spurious hits, but it looks like there were actual phone conversations, and we didn’t get anything really steady until a few hours ago.”
“What happened a few hours ago?” Dan asked.
“The phone finally came on nice and steady, and stayed on for a good hour or so. It started to look like a normal cell phone record. But it’s turned off again.”
Oh, no. Dan’s heart pounded. Sam would never leave her phone on for an hour.
He took a deep breath. “Listen carefully,” he said. “Hang up. Get that chopper to land in the field to the west of the stopped train. Text me the last coordinates on that cell phone record. And call me back in three minutes with the Secretary on the line.”
“Got it. Whose secretary do you want me to get?”
Dan shook his head. “The boss. The goddamned Secretary of Homeland Defense. Quickly!”
40
The human mind could adapt to almost anything. It was designed to ignore repeated stimuli and pay attention to novelties, new things.
It could even learn to ignore extremely important things. Like pain.
But not the kind of pain that the small, stocky, Latino man had inflicted on Sam over the past hours. That kind of pain caused the brain to howl, to scream, to fight, to detach from itself, to peel away from the reality in which it found itself, running away from the unacceptable glimpse of its imminent end.
Sweat and blood streamed from all over Sam’s body. She’d wanted to implore the vicious little man to stop, to bargain with him somehow, to figure out what he wanted and maybe make a trade of some sort, but he hadn’t uttered so much as a word, and he hadn’t once released her from the stifling, claustrophobic discomfort of the ball gag in her mouth.
She’d broken and swallowed part of a molar, involuntarily clamping her jaw shut against the steel ball as wave after wave of vicious electricity had torn through her. The pain of her now-exposed nerves brushing against the steel ball in her mouth swirled with the competing agonies of electrocution and dozens of bleeding knife wounds around her body, in her arms, legs, and abdomen.
Sam looked again into the ugly little man’s eyes, beseeching him to display some semblance of mercy, or even the slightest vestige of human compassion and empathy. But she saw something far more frightening than rage or fury in the man’s gaze.
She saw joy.
Her tormentor reveled in her suffering. He wasn’t making an example of her, exploiting her for some tidbit of information, using her to send a warning to someone else. He was simply savoring her unspeakable agony, her utter violation.
It was the same look she had seen before. But it was different now. He’d had his way with her for hours. But his demented, joy
ful gaze told her that her pain and suffering hadn’t sated his appetite, but merely whetted it.
In that moment, Sam Jameson resolved to die as quickly as she could.
As he went back to work on her exhausted, bloody body, she barely noticed the low-frequency vibration in the wall that suspended her, the whump-whump that should have been hopeful and familiar.
But the man noticed. He stopped cutting her, and he looked up at the ceiling, as if the noise was somehow coming from the roof of the building. She saw the horrible scar on the man’s throat, and wondered if maybe that wasn’t somehow the reason for his pure, unadulterated evil and hatred.
The noise and vibration grew louder, until it seemed to come from everywhere at once, and Sam vaguely registered the piercing whine of a turbine. In her exhaustion and terror, she didn’t recognize the significance of the noise, but she saw a change in the man’s visage, saw him look around quickly and with increasing urgency on his face.
The building rattled with the powerful vibrations, jarring her battered and butchered body, making breathing difficult, and she saw that the man had begun hurriedly throwing things into his duffel bag, as if to leave.
Was he bugging out?
Would it be possible to survive this, to see another sunrise, to hold Brock again, to feel love and joy and happiness?
He stood before her again, the electrical device in his hands, twisting the dial as far as it would go, reaching for the switch with his thumb.
So it ends.
Her heart broke for the loss of herself, for the loss of her days, for the end of her life together with Brock.
She heard the click of the switch. Electricity seared through her consciousness, destroying her body, arching her back once again in horrific, burning agony.
There was a loud crash, the painfully bright intrusion of daylight into the chamber of horrors, rapid movement, gunfire, the shouting of a familiar voice, the appearance of a familiar form running toward her, but Sam comprehended none of this.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 47