The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  The pilot met her at the door. “Can you have us ready to roll in five?” she asked.

  “Only if I know where we’re going,” he replied.

  Good point. Where the hell are we going? She remembered the remnants of the cell phone she had removed from the dead thug’s jacket after her pre-dawn shootout in the warehouse. She’d given them to Brock for safekeeping, just in case the encounter with the DIS hostage rescue team went sour.

  Brock still had the shattered phone, which he handed carefully to Dan for analysis.

  “Let’s hope this thing gives us some clue about what to do next,” Sam said. “I’m ready to get the hell out of this country.”

  23

  Sabot Mondragon was confused. He had expected an explosion and a mighty kick after he pulled the trigger, but he had gotten nothing of the sort. It sounded like a puff, and a little hiss, and the gun barely jerked at all. Had it misfired?

  He aimed again, filling the gun sight with Terencio Zelaya’s chest from just a few feet away, far too close to miss. He squeezed the trigger again.

  Again, the gun puffed and hissed, like a soft drink machine at a fast food restaurant. What the hell is this?

  Then he looked closer at Zelaya’s chest. Two darts protruded, stuck in the man’s torso, their small stabilizer fins visible in relief against the white physician’s coat that Zelaya wore. It was a tranquilizer gun, Sabot realized.

  Sabot pulled the trigger twice more, wondering whether he’d just given Zelaya a lethal overdose of tranquilizer, then wondering on the other hand whether he’d given Zelaya enough to keep the man from waking up anytime soon.

  Sabot stared at the small, slight, unconscious man who had wreaked such havoc on his psyche over the past… How long had it been? Days? Weeks? Sabot had no idea how long he had been held captive, and still had no clear idea of what they wanted from him.

  He looked down at his hands, flexed them, considered wrapping them around Zelaya’s neck and squeezing with all of his might, thought about what it might feel like to watch the life drain from his captor, wondered how it would feel to kill a man with his bare hands.

  He shuddered at the thought. Zelaya was undoubtedly a bastard, and he might even deserve to die. But killing another human, one who was unconscious and defenseless… That was a darkness into which Sabot lacked the will to plunge.

  So he settled for tying Zelaya’s hands behind his back using the lamp cord, and using Zelaya’s shoelaces to bind his ankles together.

  Time to find Angie and Connie and get the hell out of here.

  But where was here? He went to the window, and carefully parted the curtains a fraction of an inch, then peered through the opening. He saw diffuse light, but no sharp features beyond the window.

  He threw the curtains back. Sonuvabitch. The window wasn’t normal glass. It was made of those thick glass squares that people put in their bathroom windows. Light came in, but Sabot couldn’t see out.

  He started toward the door, but realized after two steps that he was still stark naked. He changed course and headed for the closet. Sabot discovered his clothes, cleaned and neatly pressed, hung inside the closet. Who had washed them? And when? Hadn’t he been wearing them while he was chained to the wall, underneath that freezing shower?

  Or had he dreamt all of that? Sabot still had no inkling of how he came to be in the room with the soft bed and the beautiful woman whose body he’d briefly been inside, until he’d made the shocking discovery that it wasn’t Angie’s slippery warmth he was enjoying.

  Was that real? Had he really woken up next to some girl he didn’t know? A memory came crashing on his consciousness, a recollection of his own uncontrolled rage, his own hands tightening around the girl’s neck, the way her sinew popped as he squeezed, the way panicked tears rolled down her cheeks, then a metallic smell in his nostrils and a blinding light inside his head as someone knocked him out from behind.

  Had that really happened? He reached his hand to the back of his head. Ouch. A painful knot greeted his touch. It certainly felt real enough.

  He looked again at Zelaya, lying comatose on the floor, tranquilizer darts protruding from his chest. Sabot’s head swum. Everything felt surreal. This can’t possibly be happening. The objects in the room seemed a long way away from him. His legs shook, his stomach threatened further revolt, and his breath came in shallow gasps. He felt as if he might faint.

  Sabot sat heavily on the edge of the bed. He rested his head in his hands, and became aware of the throbbing of his pulse in his temples, and the throbbing pain in the back of his head. The pain was certainly not a figment of his imagination. He was in terrible shape.

  He took several deep breaths, steeled himself, and rose to his feet. He put a hand against the wall to steady himself against a wave of dizziness, and breathed through another sickening surge of nausea. They screwed me up good, he thought.

  He dressed, pausing for breath between clothing articles. It felt as though he’d been in bed for months. His body lacked strength, and he wondered how he had possibly overcome Zelaya in a fistfight just moments earlier.

  I’ve got to get out of here. They’re killing me. He took the tranquilizer pistol and tucked it into the back of his pants, like he’d seen people do in the movies. He had no real experience with physical violence, having instead chosen to commit his crimes using a computer keyboard, and he felt decidedly vulnerable. He needed to use his head, to stay out of situations that would require him to use his body. He couldn’t rely on his physical skills in the best of circumstances, and certainly not when his head felt six feet thick.

  Sabot stepped over Zelaya’s body, lying inert in the doorway to the foyer, and made his way through an anteroom full of dated Dick Van Dyke furniture to what appeared to be the exit.

  There’s no goddamned doorknob.

  Just a key slot greeted him. He pushed against the door, but it didn’t budge. He knelt down and slipped his fingers between the floor and the door, and used friction to tug inward on the door, but it didn’t move. It was locked.

  Sonuvabitch!

  Sabot paced, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists. No windows and no doorknob. The place was built by kidnappers. How the hell would he get out?

  His eyes returned to Zelaya’s body. Of course. He walked over and knelt next to Zelaya, and searched the comatose man’s pockets. It didn’t take long to find a key ring full of two dozen identical-looking keys, each differentiated only by a stenciled number.

  Sabot returned to the door and tried each key in sequence. It seemed to take forever. He went through all of the keys without success. He felt despair and panic creep into the edges of his consciousness. How was it that none of the damned keys worked in this damned lock?

  He cursed his stupidity. He had tried all of the keys with the jagged part facing down. He hadn’t even thought to try any of them the other way. You gotta get your mind right, vato, he chided himself. He started again.

  A half-dozen keys into his second attempt, he found the right one. It slipped easily into the slot, and Sabot heard the lock click as he turned the key clockwise.

  Adrenaline surged through his veins, and his heart pounded anew. He pulled slowly on the key, opening the door just a crack, subconsciously holding his breath as he looked out the door and listened for any signs of movement.

  It looked like a hotel hallway. He saw ugly carpet on the floors, grossly outdated wallpaper and pseudo-art on the walls, and half a dozen identical doors, each with a number but no doorknob.

  He watched and waited, breathing as quietly as he could. No motion caught his eye, and no sounds alerted his ears. He pushed the door open wider, and peered around the doorjamb in the opposite direction down the hall. He saw a single door at the end of the hall, again with only a key slot and no other opening mechanism.

  Sabot took a deep breath and tiptoed out into the hallway. Were Connie and Angie in one of these rooms?

  He glanced at the number on the front of his door: 427. I
t corresponded to the number stenciled on the key that had liberated him. He found key 428, and quietly opened the door to the room next to his.

  Sabot snuck inside the room. It was nearly identical to the room he’d just left, except this room showed no signs of recent habitation. No clothes hung in the closet, all of the bathroom towels were fresh, and the bed was made.

  He crept carefully out of the room and snuck one door further down the hall, repeating the process of quietly inserting the key, turning it slowly, applying slight pressure to silently move the door away from the jamb, and carefully peeking inside the room before stepping through the door.

  Empty.

  Same for room number 430. And 431. His heart sank. His hopes of finding Angie and her mother were fading fast.

  There was but a single room left in the hallway, number 426. He inserted the key, turned the lock, and snuck in.

  This room felt different. The chairs in the kitchenette were pulled away from the table, as if used and not replaced. Sabot’s heart rate surged. Angie?

  He crept through the anteroom toward the bedroom. He heard the shower running through the wall. His hopes soared. Had he found the girls? God, I hope so. There was so much to discuss, so much he wanted — needed — to tell Angie. Time was short and life was precious, and he hadn’t properly expressed the way she had changed his life for the better, the way he wanted to be part of her life until they were old and wrinkled.

  He caught sight of the bed. It had been slept in. Someone’s definitely here. The closet doors were open, but he couldn’t see any clothes inside.

  Sabot crept toward the bathroom, felt the steam from the shower warm his face as he rounded the corner. Someone was in the shower, washing.

  Eager anticipation took over, and he abandoned caution. “Angie?” he called. “Angie, is that you?” He walked across the tile floor to the shower curtain, raised his hand to draw it back so he could lay eyes on his Angie for the first time in a horrific eternity.

  The shower curtain flew open. A deep voice yelled.

  Sabot leapt back in shock.

  The man nearly lost his balance in the shower, gripping a handhold at the last second to avoid a painful fall on the hard, wet tile. “What the hell!” he hollered.

  Sabot backed away from the shower, his hands raised in a conciliatory gesture. He regarded the wet, naked abomination of a body in the shower. The man was fat, balding, his jowly face draped by the longest flap of comb-over hair Sabot had ever seen.

  Familiar.

  “Hey, I know you!” the man said. “Are you behind all this bullshit?” He scrambled to turn off the water and throw a towel around his waist. “Wait till I get out of this shower. I’m going to kick your ass, you sonuvabitch!”

  Why did the man look familiar to Sabot? Had they met before? “Do I know you?” Sabot asked.

  The fat, naked man huffed. “Knew I shouldn’t have trusted a complete stranger,” he said as he dried off. “You just wait, buddy, I’m going to hand you your ass.” He wagged a finger at Sabot. “Lock me up like a damn criminal, you’re gonna find out what happens…”

  The airplane. This was the guy who had begged Sabot to share the charter flight from Canada to Costa Rica. “Wait a minute,” Sabot said. “They locked you up, too?”

  “I’m in this goddamned cage, aren’t I?”

  He had a point. There wasn’t a doorknob to get out of this room, either, Sabot reflected.

  “Tell me your name again,” Sabot said.

  The man stopped drying off, and used his hand to whip his comb-over into place. “Fredericks,” he said. “Bill Fredericks.”

  24

  “Slobodan Radosz,” Dan said. “He turned up in the Interpol database.” Dan had lifted three distinct sets of prints from the smooth plastic face of the dead spy’s cell phone, the one that Sam had shattered as she slipped in a pool of the man’s blood and fell hard on the cement floor of the warehouse.

  Two sets of prints had returned a match. One of them belonged to Sam. As a federal agent, Sam’s prints were in the database, and she had obviously handled the phone.

  The second set apparently belonged to Radosz, a small-time Serbian criminal who had been jailed briefly in Macedonia for agitation, just before the war broke out in Kosovo, but had subsequently worked his way onto the Interpol watch list as a potential terror suspect.

  The system hadn’t found a match for the third set of prints.

  “Thanks, Dan,” Sam said. “I’m betting the dead guy isn’t Radosz.”

  Dan nodded his agreement. “He looked pretty professional. Too professional to have a record.” It wouldn’t make any sense for a clandestine organization of any standing to go to the trouble of training a field agent who had an arrest history. All of the agent’s biometrics would be in police computer systems all over the planet. It would just be too hard for him to hide, and too easy for him to leave damning evidence behind.

  But nothing said that Radosz couldn’t be the wet man’s handler. “Radosz is probably middle management,” Sam said.

  Dan agreed. “But it’s a weird scenario,” he said. “A Macedonian Serb’s fingerprints on a dead pro’s burner in Costa Rica?”

  “Right.” A pro they’d shot while trying to orchestrate a hostage rescue, a scenario that had unfolded as they were trying to track a cyber criminal who had recently fled North America from a Canadian airport. It made Sam’s head hurt. “This one’s kicking my ass,” she admitted. “Anything on the SIM card?”

  Dan inserted the electronic chip from the disposable phone into a USB device, which he stuck into the side of his laptop. He clicked a few keys, then frowned. “It’s a DC area code.”

  “Of course it is,” Sam said with a sardonic smile. “Recognize the number?”

  Dan shook his head. “No. But I’ll check the registration. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Odds were high that the call to the dead agent’s phone would have originated from another disposable cell phone, but it paid to check anyway.

  “Holy shit,” Dan said, eyebrows arched in surprise. “It’s a registered number.”

  “Cell?” Sam asked.

  “No, residential. One of those bundled internet and phone deals.”

  “People still have those?”

  Dan chuckled. “Apparently. Looks like it’s registered to…” He frowned again. “Seriously?”

  “What?” Sam prodded.

  “It’s registered to John Q. Public. No shit.”

  Sam shook her head. Very funny. “Is it a real address?”

  Dan called up a high-resolution street map. “Sure looks like it. One of those new apartment buildings in Shirlington.”

  A memory flashed in Sam’s mind, images of the Shirlington apartment that contained the bloody remains of a friend and colleague. I’m getting tired of all of this, she thought. “Any other information?”

  Dan nodded. “Apartment 1236. Looks like it’s on the top floor of the building. Let me ping it to be sure.” More keystrokes sent an electronic ping from the massive computer server in the basement of the Homeland building in DC to the telephone number they had discovered in the phone’s SIM card. Seconds later, a confirmatory window popped open on Dan’s laptop. “Positive. It’s a real phone number in a real place,” he said.

  Sam’s face registered surprise. “Who sends instructions to a field goon from a phone with a physical address?” It didn’t make any sense. It was just too easy to trace phone calls.

  “Red herring?” Dan asked.

  “Feels like it,” Sam said. But then she had second thoughts. “Although it’s not always possible to hide communications to and from agents in the field with a cut-out layer protecting both ends. Sometimes you have to take a risk.”

  Dan nodded. “Maybe they were in a bind.”

  Brock piped up. “We just flew down here last night,” he said. “It isn’t like we planned the trip weeks in advance. Maybe they were scrambling to put our welcoming committee together.”

  “Good point
,” Sam agreed. “Maybe they didn’t have time to do it clean. We probably have to investigate the lead.”

  “There’s another call in the SIM card’s registry,” Dan said. “This one’s an outbound call. It’s to a foreign number. I don’t recognize the country code.”

  “Let’s try to Zip Line it,” Sam said. She was referring to the top secret payload on a few government satellites that allowed Big Brother to find virtually any cell phone on any network within the satellite network’s footprint.

  Dan navigated to the Zip Line client on his laptop. “Shit. Still completely backlogged.”

  He called the agents-only hotline at Homeland. Someone answered this time, and Dan asked the operator to patch him through to the National Technical Means department. The phone rang a dozen times before the operator picked back up. “I’ve tried paging them as well,” the operator said, “but nobody answers.”

  “Damned cubicle zombies,” Dan groused.

  Sam frowned. “Time to ask dad for the keys,” she said, choosing a familiar contact in her cell phone and pressing the “call” button.

  As her phone rang, the pilot walked up the stairway, his preflight inspection complete. “We’re ready to roll,” he said, “but I still need to know where we’re going.”

  “Working on it,” Sam said, phone pressed to her ear.

  The call connected on the fifth ring. Mason McClane sounded terrible. “Have you slept yet, boss?” she asked.

  “For a couple of hours, on my couch,” he said. “It’s been pretty nonstop here.”

  “Nonstop what?”

  “Meetings, phone calls, emails. The Executive Branch has worked itself into a lather.”

  “Treacherous,” Sam said.

  Her sarcasm wasn’t lost on McClane. “Not all of us get to play cops and robbers. Update me, please.”

  Sam told him about how the DIS hostage team rescued Trojan, Harv Edwards, and two Costa Rican agents. She left out the part about the shootout inside the warehouse that she and Dan had experienced just moments before the DIS team arrived. It had been a direct violation of McClane’s earlier orders, and she wasn’t in the mood for one of those conversations.