AWOL with the Operative

by Jean Thomas

The security in the lobby was tight. But, even though his shield and ID had gone up in smoke back in Canada, he had no trouble getting past the desk. Not only was he a familiar face to the guards, he wore his picture tag fixed to the lapel of his suit coat that hadn’t gone with him to Canada.

  One of the elevators carried him to an upper floor where his department was located. News had to have traveled through the ranks that he was missing and there had been no contact from him, because heads turned as Sam made his way through the bull pen toward his squad supervisor’s office. But only one of the special agents spoke to him.

  The gum-chewing Whit Cooper popped up from his cubicle with a loud “You’re back! Man, have we been worried about you!”

  Everything Whit did was loud, and sometimes obnoxious. Not that Sam had anything against him. Whit just thought he was being funny. He wasn’t.

  The only other agent who acknowledged his return with a wave of welcome and a boyish grin of pleasure was Bud Lowry. Sam liked Bud, flaming hair, freckles and all. He was a good agent.

  Although he and Bud weren’t exactly close, they did hang out together on occasion, which was why he hated to ignore the guy. But a meeting with Kowsloski was a priority.

  Without breaking his stride, Sam returned the wave with a silently mouthed “Later,” promising himself he would stop by Bud’s desk on his way out.

  Frank was on the phone when Sam arrived at his office. The squad supervisor faced the window, his back to the open door. Kowsloski had the uncanny ability to sense when one of his agents appeared in his private domain. Unless the wave of excitement out in the bull pen had alerted him, that was true now.

  Either way, he swiveled around in his chair behind his desk. There was no expression on his round face when he discovered Sam standing there just inside the door.

  “I’ll have to call you back,” he said to whoever was on the other end of the line. Placing the phone back in its cradle, he addressed Sam with a calm “You okay?”

  “Don’t I look okay?”

  “Yeah, you do.” Then both his expression and his tone sharply altered, his fleshy face going a livid red, his voice rising from flat to a roar. “Then why the hell didn’t you contact me? And where is Eve Warren?”

  “In a safe place here in the city.”

  Voices carried, maybe to the wrong ears. Aware of that, Sam closed the office door behind him before he approached Frank’s desk. Hands planted on its surface, he leaned toward the squad supervisor.

  “Are you going to go on blasting me, or do you want to hear what’s happened since you sent me off to the Yukon?”

  “I know what happened. You and Eve Warren went down in a plane in the wilderness. The one and only report I got from Canada, with no word since then, was that the wreckage was never sighted.”

  “Not by the authorities up there, but DeMarco’s boys had no trouble finding us. They were the ones who forced the plane down. You interested in the rest?”

  “I’m listening, but you’d better make me like what I hear. If not, you could be sweeping floors out there in the bull pen instead of carrying a badge.”

  Sam launched into his story, telling Kowsloski everything he needed to know as concisely as possible, starting with his arrival in the Yukon and ending with his and Eve’s return to Chicago and their discovery of the flash drive.

  Frank was silent for a moment after Sam’s plea to him to enlist Internal Affairs in finding and taking down the mole. Was the squad supervisor convinced that a mole did exist? Sam didn’t learn that. All he finally got from Kowsloski was a quiet, deadly “I want that flash drive, McDonough.”

  “You don’t get it, or where I’ve stashed Eve Warren, until the mole is out of the way.”

  “You know what you’re risking here, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I know. Trading in my career for that broom.”

  From the time he had opened those tax files on his computer, Sam had considered turning the flash drive over to his squad supervisor. It was all Frank wanted, needed. But that wouldn’t guarantee Eve’s safety. As long as the mole was active, feeding DeMarco information, she was in danger.

  The mobster was unpredictable. If he was led to believe that Eve had knowledge of his activities beyond the existence of those tax records, could testify against him, he was capable of ordering a hit on her.

  No, Sam wouldn’t take that chance. He had taken a chance with Lily, and look how that had turned out. Withholding the flash drive was his only leverage, his only way to protect Eve until the mole was revealed.

  He stood erect, leaning away from the desk. “Well?”

  Frank muttered a reluctant, “I’ll get Internal Affairs on it. But I warn you, McDonough, if this thing backfires, I’m gonna have your ass.”

  Sam remembered his promise to himself to stop by Bud Lowry’s desk when he came away from the squad supervisor’s office. But Bud was no longer in his pod. He spoke to Lowry’s neighbor, another special agent, on the other side of the divider.

  “Angie, you know where Bud went?”

  She seemed to be engrossed in a report she was writing on her computer. Looking up from her work, she tossed Sam a brief “He had a dentist appointment for a tooth that’s been giving him trouble all week.”

  That was when Sam noticed that her other neighbor, Whit Cooper, was also no longer on the scene. “Where’s Whit?”

  “Dunno. He mumbled something about an errand and just took off.”

  “Thanks. Tell Bud when he returns that I’ll catch him later.”

  It wasn’t until Sam was going down in the elevator that, for no reason he could name, he began to have an uneasy feeling about Whit Cooper’s sudden, swift departure from his desk. That feeling escalated when he reached the lobby.

  Was it possible? No, that was crazy. He was being paranoid. Obnoxious or not, Whit had too clean a record to be Victor DeMarco’s paid informant.

  All right, so maybe just before he had closed Frank’s office door, the guy might have overheard Sam’s assurance to their squad supervisor that he’d put Eve in a safe place. It didn’t make Whit Cooper the mole, not when other agents in the bull pen could have heard the same thing.

  All the same, his suspicion persisted as he exited the building and headed rapidly toward his car. No motive, he tried to tell himself. Whit had no motive to turn informer. Unless…

  He remembered something about Whit. Something potentially damning. Cooper had a gambling habit. Or did have, because a couple of weeks ago he claimed to have cured himself. But what if that was a lie? What if Whit was so steeped in gaming debts he’d been willing to feed DeMarco information in exchange for sums he badly needed? Even perform other favors for the mobster?

  It was only speculation, not evidence. Not enough to alert Frank Kowsloski and maybe harm the reputation of a solid agent.

  But it was enough to send Sam speeding out of the parking lot with a sense of deepening urgency he couldn’t seem to shake, even though he tried to tell himself Eve couldn’t be in danger. Whit wouldn’t have the remotest idea where she was.

  That was what Sam convinced himself. Until on his way to his apartment building he remembered something else that made him sick with dread. Whit knew he had the key to that other apartment.

  Sam and Bud Lowry sometimes engaged in a game of handball after work. A few weeks back, Bud had accompanied him home so Sam could change clothes for the court. Whit Cooper, although uninvited, had ended up tagging along with them. He’d witnessed Sam trying to fit the wrong key into his door, listened to him mutter an explanation of why he had the almost identical key to the apartment across the hall on his ring.

  Whit Cooper would have guessed where he could find Eve Warren!

  That certainty had Sam breaking every traffic law in his need to get back to Eve. Praying all the way he would reach her in time. In time for what he wouldn’t allow himself to consider. But if that SOB put his hands on her…

  He caught a break when he reached his building. The parking spa
ce he had vacated was still open. A miracle. Not that he would have hesitated to double-park in the street.

  He didn’t wait for the elevator. He used the stairs, knowing as he raced up to his floor that Cooper would have had no trouble getting into his neighbor’s apartment. All Whit would have had to do was hunt up the building super, flash his FBI credentials and the super would have unlocked the door for him.

  A result that was confirmed when Sam reached the door and found it ajar. His fear overriding his caution, he smacked the door wide open to total silence.

  The first thing he noticed was the absence of the pistol from the coffee table where he had placed it. The second was Eve’s empty bag on the floor, its contents strewn across the carpet.

  Gone! Cooper had taken her away. But where and how long ago?

  Needing to make certain the place was deserted, that Cooper wasn’t holding Eve in one of the other rooms, Sam made a swift tour of the apartment.

  He had reached the second, smaller bedroom. Was squeezing his way past the king-sized bed and the wall toward a bathroom when, forced to turn sideways in order to navigate the narrow space, he found it necessary to steady himself with a hand on the ledge of the window there. That was how he discovered it in the alley below at the side of the building.

  A dark green SUV facing out toward the street. He recognized the vehicle with a jolt of disbelief. It belonged not to Whit Cooper but to Bud Lowry. Lowry was down there now, and he wasn’t alone. He had Eve with him. Was forcing her at gunpoint to slide behind the wheel of the SUV.

  The pistol. Lowry was using the pistol he had helped himself to from the coffee table, not the FBI weapon issued to him. A weapon whose bullets could be traced back to him if he had to shoot his captive.

  Not Eve! He couldn’t lose Eve as he had lost Lily! It would kill him if that happened.

  He had no time to wonder why his friend had turned mole. All that mattered was Eve. Gut churning with a desperate promise to himself to save the woman he so reluctantly loved, fiercely denying that love to himself even now, Sam sped out of the apartment and along the hall to the stairway. The stairway he must have been climbing at the same time Lowry was taking Eve down in the elevator and out a side door to the alley.

  There was no sign of the SUV when he reached the street. It would have fled the alley by now with a terrified Eve at the wheel. Going where? Sam asked himself as he sprinted toward the Mustang. He still didn’t know. Not until he was tearing recklessly up the one-way street in pursuit, anyway. And then he had a pretty good idea of Lowry’s destination.

  Eve had a terrible feeling she was going to be delivered to Victor DeMarco. Used as a hostage in exchange for the incriminating tax records. Or worse.

  She had tried to confirm that, but her captor refused to tell her anything, including his identity. He wouldn’t, of course, although she could guess. Whoever he was, he wore the same dark, conservative suit Sam had worn when he’d left her in the apartment. The uniform of an FBI special agent. The mole who had betrayed them? Had to be.

  How he had found her in that apartment—taken her by surprise, while she was stretched out on the sofa in an effort to catch up on her lost sleep of last night—was another mystery. Not that it mattered. All that did matter was how frightened she was, scarcely able to manage the SUV as they wove through the streets.

  “Do you have to keep that gun trained on me? You’re making me nervous. You don’t want us to get into an accident, do you?”

  “Shut up and drive,” he snarled. “Take the next turn left.”

  Eve did as he directed. What other choice did she have?

  A moment later she found herself blending in with the traffic on a freeway that seemed to be headed in a northerly direction. She was used to driving in big-city traffic in St. Louis. But Chicago traffic was murder. It needed all her concentration.

  Maybe that’s why it took her a while to notice it behind them in the rearview mirror. A sporty, silver Mustang. Not just any silver Mustang, either. This one had a broken headlamp. The left one.

  Sam! It had to be Sam back there!

  She remembered him complaining about the headlight when the taxi had dropped them off in front of his building yesterday. Remembered him grumbling, “Probably kids playing ball again in the street when they’ve got a park just a half block over.”

  It couldn’t be anything but Sam’s silver Mustang. How long had he been following them? As far back as somewhere in that maze of streets before the freeway? If so, she hadn’t been aware of him. Not when she’d been so worried, wondering if she would have any opportunity to get away from her captor before they reached their destination. Because once they got there, there would be no chance for an escape.

  But now there was Sam speeding to her rescue on a—well, with a silver charger under him, if not a white one. Providing, that is, he could keep them in sight. And that was a problem. The traffic was thickening, with other vehicles squeezing between the Mustang and the SUV.

  There were tense moments when she lost sight of the Mustang in her rearview mirror. To her relief, it always appeared again, either directly behind them or a few car lengths back in one of the other lanes.

  But how long could Sam continue to follow the SUV before it disappeared on him altogether? Unless…

  Easing her pressure on the accelerator, Eve slowed the SUV, letting it drop back.

  “What are you doing?” her red-haired captor demanded.

  Her effort was a mistake. He’d been too busy holding the gun on her, watching her every move, to check the traffic behind them. But if she made him suspicious…

  “Just trying not to hit the car in front of me.”

  “Get over to the right, and you won’t. And keep your speed up.”

  She obeyed him while searching her mind for some other way to help Sam. Her captor gave it to her when they’d traveled another half mile or so up the highway.

  “We’re going to leave the freeway on the exit after the next one. Get over to the outside lane so you’re ready for it.”

  Eve did as she was instructed. Only it wasn’t the second exit that she made her target. It was the first one.

  “Not here!” her captor screamed at her when she aimed the SUV down the off-ramp. “The next one! I told you the next one!”

  “Stop shouting at me. You’re confusing me.”

  “Get us back on the freeway. Now.”

  Had her ruse worked? She flashed a glance in the rearview mirror. There was no sign of Sam. All she could do now was attempt another delay. Hope he would catch up to them.

  “Where are you going? This isn’t the way to the on-ramp!”

  “The way you keep yelling at me, why wouldn’t I miss it? I’ll have to find a place to turn around.”

  “Then you’d better find it, and find it fast!”

  What she found after they’d traveled another block along the street was a narrow alley. One that was blocked less than halfway along its length by a large trash receptacle. Eve didn’t hesitate to swing into it.

  “You stupid bitch! You’ve got us into a dead end with nowhere to turn! Back out!”

  Too late for that. The Mustang arrived, sliding into the alley behind them. And this time the man at her side was fully aware of it.

  Eve felt the barrel of the pistol jammed into her side.

  “Get out,” he commanded her. “And don’t try to make a run for it, unless you want a bullet in your back.”

  With trembling hands, she unbuckled her seat belt, opened the door and exited the SUV. The pistol remained in her side as he scooted under the wheel directly behind her.

  Sam was out of his car, not daring to approach them. Watching them carefully as her captor shifted the gun in his hand to the back of her head, wrapped his other arm tightly around her waist and backed them up against the trash receptacle.

  “I’ll shoot her, Sam, if you don’t let us out of here. I swear I will.”

  His voice low and even, but with steel behind every w
ord, Sam answered him with a confident “No, you won’t. It’s over, Bud. You’re finished. Be smart and let her go. You can cut a deal if you cooperate. Probably spend a few years behind bars, maybe shorten your sentence with good behavior.”

  “You’re forgetting who’s holding the gun here.”

  “Or,” Sam continued, as if he hadn’t heard the other man, “you can make the kind of mistake that will cost you a lifetime in prison.”

  “Not if I kill both of you and leave you in this alley. No witnesses, Sam.”

  “But you won’t do that. Hear those sirens, Bud? See, when I came chasing down off that ramp it was at top speed. Made sure a police cruiser saw that, too. The cops think they’re after me, but when they get here and it’s all sorted out, it’s you they’ll be hauling off in handcuffs.”

  Sam wasn’t bluffing. The sirens were louder now, heralding their approach. There was a taut silence of indecision in the alley itself. It probably lasted for only seconds, but seemed much longer than that to Eve before she felt the pistol swing away from her, heard it clatter on the pavement, experienced the relief of her captor releasing her.

  She was conscious by then of the flashing blue and red lights of the cruiser and its backup in the mouth of the alley, the banging of car doors. Only dimly so, however, since her awareness was more fully occupied with an effort to keep herself from collapsing now that she no longer had the support, welcome or not, of the man called Bud.

  Her legs must have been visibly sagging, because Sam was suddenly there, his arms wrapping around her. His strong, protective embrace felt wonderful, even though Eve knew this could be the last time she would experience it.

  Chapter 14

  Eve was amazed at the speed and efficiency of the FBI when it swung into action, as it did within minutes of their arrival at the Chicago division.

  Eve was led to an office by one of the special agents who introduced herself as Angela Carter. Although the woman, who looked more like a runway model than an agent, was sympathetic, she wanted every detail, rapidly taking each of them down on a computer.