The Senator

by Ken Fite

  “There are two men dead and he’s got a gun,” I heard the woman say to someone on the phone. “There isn’t anyone else here yet. Can you please send someone right now?”

  I assumed she had called the police. “I’m running out of time!” I yelled into my cell.

  “It’s not possible to get around that passcode from here, Blake. The NSA can do it remotely. I think the FBI can, too. But we can’t yet. I have software here that might work, but I need the phone to do that.”

  The sound of the lady’s voice was getting louder. I thought she might be headed back to Mitchell’s apartment to give the authorities I assumed she was speaking to a play-by-play of what she was seeing.

  “Blake? You there?” Morgan asked as I decided what to do.

  “I have to go,” I replied and disconnected the call.

  I stuffed Mitchell’s phone in my pocket, unplugged his laptop, and shut the lid. I tucked it under my arm as I walked out into the hallway. The lady, who I could see lived in the apartment next door, caught a glimpse of me and closed her door as I ran back to the stairwell that I used to enter the building.

  I hurried down the dark stairwell and stopped when I got to the ground floor and cracked the door open to look outside. There was nobody on the street, so I walked past the Starbucks that was now completely empty and made my way back to my SUV parked at Wells and Division.

  As I got to the car, I heard the warble of police sirens approaching. I climbed inside, and seconds later, two patrol cars buzzed past me and slowed down to turn the corner when they got to Scott Street.

  After they turned, I started my truck and drove south on Wells, then west on Division, headed back to DDC.

  For all the FBI knew, they already had David Mitchell’s cell phone and laptop. Nobody would know that I had taken them. But finding two dead bodies and the only lead being a witness seeing an officer at the crime scene would be highly suspicious. Maybe they’d think the killer carried a badge around with him.

  I worried about the lady that saw me in Mitchell’s apartment. I didn’t see any cameras anywhere in the building, so I knew it would be hard to prove I was the person she’d seen. But I had identified myself as law enforcement. I had shown her my badge to help calm her down. But it didn’t help. Instead of calming her down, it made her suspicious, because I was the only agent there, and that didn’t make sense.

  Now the police and soon the FBI would be looking for me, not whoever actually killed these two men.

  THIRTY-TWO

  VICTOR PEREZ WALKED into the warehouse and glanced at the senator. “Miss me?” he asked. Keller didn’t respond and kept his eyes closed. “I know you’re awake, Mr. Keller. Tired? Yes. Asleep? No.”

  To that the senator opened his eyes and sat up. “Where’d you go?” he asked Perez and got a chuckle returned to him as the only response.

  The kidnapper entered the next room, never breaking his stride, and turned the TV back on. He flipped through the news channels to catch up on what he’d missed.

  Keller wondered how his kidnapper knew he was faking. Maybe the guy was watching him somehow and that was the strange feeling he kept getting. But that breathing—where was it coming from? Was someone else actually there? Was someone hiding somewhere in the dark room, just beyond the battery-powered lantern’s reach?

  It did a great job illuminating the area between the rooms that Perez was using to work from to carry out his dark mission, but what was beyond what the light could see?

  The thought bothered Keller and he started working on the pipe again, yanking at it every which way, but unable to get it to budge. He looked up and found that his kidnapper was standing right next to him.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?” he asked, and Keller let go of the pipe and turned to face the man.

  He tried to place his kidnapper’s voice with the slight accent. Keller thought he’d heard it before tonight and was sure he knew the man and convinced himself that this was why he still wore the mask.

  Keller had met so many people over the last year, he tried connecting the voice to one of the images in his mind of the thousands of people he’d spoken with while on the campaign trail. He just couldn’t connect the dots, but he was sure that whoever this man was, they had met before tonight.

  The kidnapper laughed at the sight of someone who could have become the most powerful man in the world now handcuffed to a large metal pipe and desperately yanking at it to try to break free.

  “Mr. Keller, I suggest you get some rest and save your strength. You have a very big day tomorrow,” he said and began to walk away.

  “Whatever you’re planning on doing to me, or use me for, it’s not going to work. By now, there are hundreds of men and women across every governmental agency scouring Chicago looking for me.”

  But as he said those words, the senator thought of one agent, the only one he believed could save him—Blake Jordan. He hoped that Blake was almost there.

  He didn’t know how much time there was left. But he found the answer a moment later when the kidnapper laughed again and responded one last time to the senator.

  “There’s no way out of this, Mr. Keller. Nobody can save you now. And you can’t save yourself either. Tomorrow, you’ll give the speech you were supposed to give tonight. And the whole world will be watching you live. But I’m going to have to change the script a little. And if you’re good, if you give the performance of your life for me, I’ll execute you quickly. Get some rest.”

  James Keller brought his legs up to his chest, hugged them with his arms, and dropped his head in defeat.

  He shuddered at the thought that tomorrow he’d be used as a propaganda tool for this madman. What point was he trying to make to the world? What would he have him confess to on behalf of America?

  Once again, Keller got a nagging feeling that he was being watched—that he wasn’t alone. He had forgotten about the breathing, but the thought came back to him and he dismissed it as soon as it did. The kidnapper’s words echoed in his mind: There’s no way out of this, Mr. Keller. Nobody can save you now.

  He kept his eyes closed for several minutes to clear his mind, but the feeling that someone was there just wouldn’t go away.

  The senator slowly raised his head, and it took several seconds for his eyes to adjust to the light from the lantern. But as they did and his vision came into focus, Keller realized that there wasn’t just one light, there were two—a bright one and a smaller, dimmer light. And the small light was moving.

  James Keller realized that the second light he was seeing was from the screen of a cell phone.

  Someone was there, signaling to him like a lighthouse signals to a distressed ship. It was telling him, I’m here. I’ll help you.

  THIRTY-THREE

  WHEN I WALKED into DDC, I made a beeline to Morgan’s workstation. He was typing away, still trying to get the trace, I assumed. I’ve always been a fan of his work ethic, even if his attitude could use some adjusting. The guy never slept and worked around the clock if he had to.

  “Here,” I said, and handed Morgan David Mitchell’s white iPhone over his shoulder. He grabbed it and slowly turned his chair around and stared at me.

  “Blake? You just took the phone?”

  I shook my head. “No—I took the laptop, too,” I said with a smirk and set Mitchell’s laptop that I had in my other hand on his desk. It made a loud thud as I set it down.

  “Blake, you can’t just take things from the scene of a crime. You know—tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, that kind of thing.”

  “The FBI already did that. They have Mitchell’s phone and laptop. Whatever is on these devices is on the ones the Bureau took. And if not, they’ll get easy access to his phone records and web traffic. We don’t have that kind of access. But we have you. Now it’s a level playing field,” I said and started to walk away.

  Morgan stood. “I can’t be involved in this. Seriously, Blake, we can get in a lot of trouble for what w
e’re doing.”

  I stopped and turned around. “And if that happens, I will take full responsibility. You can blame me. When this is all over, if Base doesn’t send someone down here to fire me and if the FBI comes looking for someone to blame, I will step forward. And if I have to, I’ll step down. Morgan, please. I need your help.”

  He sat back down and I nodded.

  “Start with the phone,” I said, and I walked through the maze of cubicles to Jami’s desk.

  “I’m back,” I said as I approached her workstation.

  “Still looking into the Jihadi Coalition connection to Aasaal Nazir,” she said.

  I looked around to find a place where we could set up a command center in private. “Let’s work from a joint workroom, JW7 should be free,” I said, and Jami nodded.

  I went back to my office, undocked my laptop, and headed over to JW7. Although the agents and analysts I worked with varied by the case, it felt like the three of us—Jami, Morgan, and I—worked especially well together.

  Chris Reed was out on his own island. I had made Chris the assistant special agent in charge because he was a hell of a smart guy, a lot smarter than me, and the best thing you can do when you’re the boss is hire people who are better than you. Chris not only had a high IQ, he also had emotional intelligence. He could work by the book while being rational when needed.

  Still, Reed was the kind of guy who really could go either way on things. He could either be against you or fully on your side. It was a crapshoot.

  Right now, he was keeping his distance and monitoring the situation from afar, as the FBI had ordered.

  When I walked into JW7, Jami was already getting set up. I put my laptop down at the seat next to her and walked over to the far side of the room to brew some coffee for us.

  “The responding officers at Mitchell’s apartment already turned over control of the scene and briefed the investigators in charge,” she said.

  “That was quick. Have they issued an all-points for me yet?”

  Jami shook her head. “Not yet.”

  It was two thirty in the morning, and Morgan checked in with us every thirty minutes or so. Mitchell’s laptop would take more time to decrypt, so he said he’d run a program to scrape the contents at the same time he worked on the cell phone.

  Jami read every report she could find on Nazir and the JC while I strategized. Sometime past five, we crashed from lack of sleep but were jolted awake at six.

  “I’ve got something!” Morgan yelled as he ran to the joint workroom. Jami and I awoke at the sound of his voice. We looked at each other and I felt a rush of adrenaline surge through my body.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ABOUT HALF AN hour after the kidnapper returned and went into the next room to catch up on what the media was reporting while he was gone, Keller heard what sounded like an inflatable mattress being filled with air. A small motor was plugged into one of the extension cords coming from the small generator, and Keller heard the noise for two or three minutes. Then a second lantern that Victor Perez had been using to illuminate the room he was working in was turned off.

  He’s going to sleep, Keller thought. It was almost completely silent except for the noise coming from the generator by the bay door, far enough away from his cell that it almost faded into the background.

  Keller noticed another sound, it was the TV in the kidnapper’s room. In the now dark room that the man was in, he could see the flicker of light coming from the TV. The volume was on low, but still loud enough to allow him to be able to speak in a low voice without the man in the next room hearing him.

  Still, Senator Keller waited a long time before speaking. He once again saw the light from a cell phone signaling to him just beyond what was being lit by the lantern in his cell. Keller shook his head and waved both hands in front of him to communicate to whoever it was on the other side. Not yet, my friend. Wait.

  Keller figured that his kidnapper would have been exhausted by the events of the day and would take no time to fall asleep. He knew it took the average person five to ten minutes to fall asleep and that the next stage of sleep only lasted twenty minutes, but would be very light sleep, and the kidnapper would be prone to waking up. Keller started counting the seconds to approximate thirty minutes the best he could.

  When he got to thirty minutes, the senator started to worry that he might have counted too fast. He was nervous and just wanted to get the hell out of there. If he timed it right, this would be the best opportunity to make a move. But if he was wrong, he might be blowing the only opportunity he might have to escape.

  While counting, Keller tried to stay focused, but found it hard not to think about the light signaling to him. Who was this person, and why were they there? Would they save his life? He was about to find out.

  “Okay, it’s safe now. He should be asleep. Please come out,” Keller said.

  There was no movement for a good thirty seconds. Then he saw a foot, followed by a leg that slowly appeared from the ceiling. Keller lifted a hand to block the light coming from the lantern and squinted as his eyes adjusted. Then he saw it. There was a cubby in the rafters between the first and second floors.

  The person slowly let themselves down, holding onto one of the rafters. With feet dangling, they let go and dropped to the floor.

  The sound wasn’t loud, but it did concern Keller, who looked in the direction of the kidnapper’s room for a moment before his eyes returned to the person now standing in front of him.

  “Come here,” Keller said.

  The man walked to Keller and then knelt down on the floor next to him, and the senator realized it wasn’t a man, but a boy. Maybe sixteen or seventeen years old.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  The kid was shaking. “Tre,” he whispered.

  “Why are you here?”

  The kid’s eyes darted over to the kidnapper’s room and back.

  “My friends and I come out here sometimes to party. They never showed up today. I skipped my last class and came here and waited. I heard someone come in and thought it was them, but it was him,” he said and pointed to the other room. “He didn’t see me. I climbed up there and hid. I’ve been there all day.”

  The kid took a seat on the floor. “Are you really a senator?”

  Keller smiled. “I am. Listen, there’s no way I can get out of here. I’m handcuffed to this metal pipe and it’s not budging. The man in the next room should be sound asleep. I need you to leave right now and get the police.”

  The kid shook his head. “I’m not walking past his room. What if he’s awake?”

  Keller could tell that the kid was terrified. “Son, this is your only chance at getting out of here alive. He won’t be asleep for long.”

  Tre nodded.

  “Tell them you know where Senator Keller is being held.”

  “What if they don’t believe me?” asked Tre.

  Keller thought for a moment before he leaned in and whispered something to the kid.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  MORGAN WALKED INTO the joint workroom, holding David Mitchell’s white iPhone. “Sorry it took so long, but I got in. The phone’s unlocked,” he said and handed it to Jami, who started looking it over.

  “Did you find anything?” I asked.

  “I scraped the contents and copied them to our shared drive. I have a process running right now to parse any communications he may have made using the device. It looks like he had his email on the phone, so I’ll be able to pull that information out, too.”

  I no longer felt tired after hearing the news. Jami looked wide awake now, too.

  “Look at the call log,” Morgan said to Jami, who pulled it up.

  “He made and received a few calls to the same number tonight,” Jami said and looked at Morgan for any additional details he might have.

  “I didn’t have time to run a reverse lookup. As soon as I got the phone unlocked and the contents scraped, I came right over. But yes, he’s definitely had contact w
ith someone.”

  I turned to Morgan. “Let’s do the lookup now.”

  “May I?” Morgan asked Jami, implying that he wanted to use her laptop.

  She nodded, so he took a seat and accessed one of our internal systems. A second later, Morgan got a hit. “It’s registered to the Tribune. That’s all I’ve got.”

  That made sense to me. When numbers are registered to companies, you don’t get a whole lot of information.

  “Let’s call and see who answers,” I said.

  Jami and I were still standing while Morgan was doing his lookup. I took the phone from Jami and reached to the middle of the large table where we were working and pressed the speaker button on the Polycom phone system, and we heard a dial tone. I accessed the call log and dialed the number.

  As it rang, Jami, Morgan, and I all looked at each other, not knowing what to expect. There was a second ring, then a third; then the ringing stopped. For a moment, we thought someone had answered.

  “You’ve reached John Burnett. Sorry I missed your call. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” we heard instead, and I disconnected the line.

  “Who’s John Burnett?” I asked.

  “I’ll find out,” Morgan said and stood to walk back to his workstation to get started.

  “No, focus on the laptop and then get back to us on what you find. Jami can look into Burnett, right?”

  “I got it,” she said.

  After Morgan left the room, Jami started clacking away at her keyboard, and I turned on the TV mounted on the wall in front of us and put it on one of the cable news channels before brewing more coffee for Jami and me. It was five minutes until seven, and a banner streamed across the screen. RNC PRESS CONFERENCE AT 7…PRESIDENT SPEAKS AT 8…

  Jami was still digging and trying to find everything she could on John Burnett when the press conference started. RNC Chairwoman Debra Stewart was standing at the podium surrounded by Keller supporters who worked for his campaign. She spoke to the camera and a dozen reporters who were seated in the room that was supposed to have been used to receive the presidential nominee after his speech to celebrate with his staff. She explained what had happened, that the senator had been kidnapped, and went over the timeline. Stewart was brief and to the point. She had to be—she didn’t have more to share.