by David Archer
“The basics,” Sam said. “Unfortunately, the basics includes knowing that she’s staying here. Fei probably knows that already, anyway. I wonder if we should move, like right away.”
Steve tapped on the door and opened it, and was followed inside by Darren, Pat, Joel, and Rob. Sam quickly brought them all up to speed, and Rob turned around and left to begin planning his defensive perimeter. His first move was to send two more officers up to the top floor.
“If the triad has your man,” Pat said, “then there is a very short window to get him back alive. Unfortunately, you’ll probably have to go through dozens of triad members to even get close to him. Sam, I don’t know if you can do it. To deal with the triad, you probably need a small army, not a squad.”
“On this,” Steve said, “Pat and I agree. We are probably looking at a matter of hours, at most.”
Sam sighed. “Then how do we get a message to Fei?” he asked. “The way I see it, we’ve got only one hope and it’s not one I wanted to use.”
Pat sighed. “You going to take Becky up on her offer? Use her as bait?”
“It's the only thing I can think of that might get his attention quickly enough. The problem is, I don’t have any idea how to make him aware of the possible trade.”
“I might know of a way,” Summer said. “What is the message we want to send?”
Sam locked eyes with Pat for a moment, then turned back to Summer. “That Becky McGill is back in San Francisco, and that I’m offering to trade her for the man they captured. A simple trade, no police involved.”
She took out her phone and then removed a business card from inside her bra. She looked at it for a moment, then dialed the number and put the phone to her ear. A moment later, she smiled. “Cindy? This is Summer Raines. Remember what you said about doing me a favor? Well, I’m hoping you can tell me how to get a message to Fei. Yes, I know it’s suicidal, but he’s got a friend of mine, and I want my friend back.” She listened for a moment, then smiled again. “Okay. Here’s the message: I have Rebecca McGill and all her information. I’ll trade for the man you took from the police. Got all that? Yeah, just say it’s from the white bitch and the Chinese slut. He’ll know who to contact. And Cindy? Thank you.”
She ended the call and dropped the phone onto the bed. “Fei will have that message within the next twenty minutes. I suspect things are about to get lively around here.”
“I suspect you’re right,” Sam said. “Everybody arm yourselves. No gunfire unless absolutely unavoidable. We need to get Denny back, but without giving up Becky. If we get the chance to take Fei down in the process, so much the better.”
*
Denny had been dragged into one of the cars, then shoved to the floor with a gun to his head. A rough voice told him to stay down and be quiet. He decided the smart move was to do as he was told. He felt the car start to move, and tried to gauge how long the ride was in which direction, but it was not possible.
After what seemed like an hour but may have been only minutes, he was ordered out of the car once again. As he stepped out, he saw that they were inside a building and two men grabbed him by the arms and searched him, removing his phone and a pocketknife, then marched him toward a flight of stairs. He was walked up the stairs and shoved into a room just a short distance down the hall from where they came out, and then the door was shut and locked.
“At least I’m not naked,” he mumbled to himself. He looked around and saw that the room was roughly fifteen feet square, and contained nothing but a single chair that was bolted to the floor. “Oh, bugger,” he said. “I bloody hate days like this.”
Since there was nothing else to do, he carefully examined all of the walls, looking for any type of weakness he might use to help him escape, but they were made of solid concrete, just like the floor and the ceiling. After several minutes, he simply sat down in the chair to wait for whatever might happen next.
He didn’t have to wait very long. Three men entered the room, and two of them used heavy duty zip strips to secure him to the chair. The third man, a wiry Asian, set a laptop computer on a stool, facing Denny. On the screen was the image of a man, his face hidden in the shadow of a large hood.
“Tell me who you work for,” said the man on the screen.
“Me? I work for the Johnson Paper Mill in Odessa, Texas. Listen, if it’s money you want, I don’t have a lot but I can get some. If you take me to an ATM, I can pull out a thousand dollars for you. That work?”
The image on the screen didn’t flicker as the man spoke again. “You scaled the wall at Fa Ling Bioengineering and entered the building. The only reason to do this is if you’re aware of certain activities that I am involved in. Now, tell me who you work for. Is it the FBI? Or do you work for the private company hired by CerebroLink? I forget the name of that company, is it Witless?”
Denny stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. “FBI? Me? Dude, you gotta be kidding. I mean, come on, do I look like FBI?”
The man on the screen cocked his head to one side and seemed to be staring at Denny for a moment. “I suppose not,” he said. “I detect an irregularity in your accent. It sounds very much like you might actually speak with a native accent from, perhaps, England? I’m quite certain you’re not from Texas. You don’t have the proper drawl, especially on your vowels.”
Denny chuckled again. “Yeah? Tell that to my daddy. According to him, I sound more like Texas than Texas does. And just so you know, I ain’t never even been outside the U.S.A.”
“I am Yue Fei,” the man on the screen said suddenly. “In many ways, I’m the owner of much of San Francisco and the Valley. Almost every business of any importance in this area is beholden to me in one way or another. When it was discovered that someone had been inside the building at Fa Ling, the security notified the police, and then they notified me. Unfortunately for you, the police arrived quickly enough that you couldn't escape. Fortunately for me, one of the officers was diligent enough to detain you until my men could arrive.”
“Yeah, and one of them shot that poor cop. If they work for you, you might want to think about leaving town. If there’s one thing cops hate, it’s a cop killer. They probably won’t worry too much about getting the guy who pulled the trigger, they’ll be after the one who told them to go do it. From where I sit, that looks like you.”
“I have no fear of the police,” Fei said. “On the contrary, it is they who fear me. They have attempted for the last six months to simply identify me, and have been unable to do so. This is because I never allow myself to be exposed.” He paused for a moment, as if thinking about what to say next. “No, you are not from Texas. You are certainly from the U.K., and I believe I sense a bit of Liverpool in your speech, as well as in the structure of your face.”
Denny blinked. He had grown up in Liverpool. Was this bastard reading his mind?
How the hell could anyone spot an accent under an accent? Denny started to protest further, but the screen suddenly went dark.
A couple of minutes later, it came to life again. “Well, well,” he said. “It seems that you do work for Windlass Security, after all. Do you want to know how I know this? Oh, well, I’ll tell you anyway. I know this because the blonde woman and her Asian friend, who have been quite a nuisance until our demonstration earlier today, have sent word that they have something I want more than I want you. A trade has been proposed, and it’s one that I believe might be somewhat beneficial to me.” He said something in Chinese, and then the screen went dark again. The man who had carried the computer picked it up and walked away as the other two approached Denny.
The zip strips on his legs and wrists were quickly cut, and he was yanked to his feet. Holding his arms, the two men marched him out the door and down the stairs. He was put into the same car he had arrived in, but this time a black cloth bag was put over his head.
He waited for the car to start, but it didn’t for quite a while. There were voices speaking around him, but the language sounded l
ike Chinese or Vietnamese, and he couldn't tell which. He laid on the floorboard for at least half an hour before the car doors opened again and other men climbed inside. The engine started, and the car backed out of the building.
The ride was even longer this time, and full of so many turns that he suspected it was a deliberate attempt to keep him from knowing where they were going. The only good part about that was that it meant he was likely to survive the journey. There would be no reason to worry about what he might know if they intended to kill him when they arrived.
Finally, the sound of the road seemed to grow softer, and it took him a moment to realize that they had pulled off pavement and onto grass. The car finally came to a stop a few minutes later, and then he heard all the doors open. He was hauled out, and once again held by his arms.
“Take the bag off his head,” he heard, and he recognized the voice as Summer’s. “I want to see that he’s okay.”
The bag was snatched off Denny’s head and he blinked. While night had fallen and the sky was dark, there were several bright lights on tall poles around this area, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw Summer and Jade, holding the woman named Becky by her arms.
Denny had seen her only hours earlier, but she seemed to have put on some weight. He realized almost instantly that she was wearing body armor under her clothing, but he didn’t let on.
It was certainly the same girl, McGill’s widow. Denny thought about what this could mean, because he was quite sure Sam Prichard would never willingly trade an innocent person’s life for his. Then it dawned on him that only the women were visible; that was enough to tell him that Sam and probably most of the men he had with him were scattered around and watching what was happening, probably through rifle-mounted scopes.
“Okay,” Summer yelled. “We send them over at the same time. Are you ready?”
Denny glanced to his left, at the man who stood there. “We are ready,” that man shouted back. He turned and glanced at Denny, then nodded once to the men who were holding his arms. They gave Denny a slight push and he started walking toward the girls.
At the same moment, Becky started out. There were almost 400 feet between the two groups, and it took a moment to walk that far. As he passed Becky, she whispered, “Get ready to dive,” but she didn’t even look his way. Her eyes seemed to be fastened onto the ground, as if resigning herself to a fate worse than death.
“Windlass Security,” Sam Prichard shouted from off to the side. “Drop your weapons and get on the ground!”
Denny knew that must be his cue, and dived onto the ground. He saw Summer and Jade suddenly draw weapons and aim at the men behind him, and he rolled so that he could see Becky. She had also hit the ground, and the Asian men were clawing at their jackets, pulling pistols out as quickly as they could. One of them aimed his gun at Becky, and his face disintegrated instantly.
“I said drop your weapons,” Sam shouted again. “You’re surrounded, you cannot escape. Put them down and cooperate, and you might live to see freedom again someday.”
Another of the men tried to aim at Summer and Jade, and he also suddenly became headless. As his body fell to the ground, the other two men suddenly decided they wanted to live a little longer. They dropped their weapons and raised their hands, and security men came rushing out of the darkness to take them down.
He felt a presence beside him and looked up, just in time to see Summer smiling as she reached a hand down to help him get onto his feet. “Hey, soldier,” she said. “Buy a girl a drink?”
“It’ll be my bloody pleasure, right? You want dinner to go with that?”
She grinned. “We’ll talk about that later,” she said. She and Jade led the way to where Sam, Steve, and several other men were dealing with their captives.
Pat had also come out of the darkness, and was helping Becky get up. “Honey, you okay?” Pat asked.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said. She put her hand to her mouth as she saw the bodies laying in front of the car, but managed not to throw up. “Is everyone else all right?”
“As far as I can tell,” Pat said. “Of course, now we got a crazy dragonhead who wants to kill us all.”
Becky looked up at him and grinned. “Welcome to my world,” she said.
Jade, driving the car that she and Summer had brought Becky in, pulled up beside them. “Hop in,” she said. “We need to disappear quickly. That was enough gunfire that the police will want to check it out.”
Pat and Becky slid into the back seat, and Denny joined them while Summer took shotgun. Jade pulled up beside Sam, who was watching as Rob lifted the two surviving triad members to their feet.
“What are we going to do with them?” Becky asked.
“Turns out C-Link owns a building they don’t use for anything,” Jade said, “out in a mostly abandoned industrial park. Joel arranged for us to be able to use it, and he’ll meet us there with the key. Summer is going to interrogate them, try to find out where Fei is so we can take him down.”
“Don’t we have to wait here for the police?” Pat asked. “Considering that two people died here, shouldn’t we be answering questions?”
“Darren is going to handle that,” Summer replied. “It’s kind of confusing, but Windlass Security has a contract with the government that makes all of its employees special agents of the Department of Homeland Security, so any case we work on that touches on national security automatically activates that clause. What that boils down to is that while we’re working on the C-Link case, we’re also working on determining what level of threat this case poses to national security. We’ll have to file a report about those deaths, but they’re almost automatically considered justifiable homicide at this point. That will need to be approved or rejected after the report is reviewed in Washington. So far, it’s always been just rubber stamp approval.”
Sam and Rob had gotten their prisoners into their own car, brought up by Steve Beck. Two more cars, each with two security men, were waiting to fall in behind as they drove away from the parklike area where the confrontation had taken place.
Denny got out and walked over to Sam. “I need a ride,” he said. “I left a lot of evidence back in Petaluma, hidden away. We’re going to need it.”
Sam turned to Rob, who told the men in the second car to take Denny where he wanted to go. “Right, all good,” Denny said, “but I’m going to need to borrow a cell phone. Fei and his boys did something with mine, no clue what.”
One of the men handed him a phone, and he got into the car. A moment later, they were on the way to retrieve the drone and the flash drives.
The drive to the building that was the destination for everyone else took nearly a half hour, and Joel was waiting, just as they had been told. He got out of the car he was driving when they pulled up and unlocked the door while everyone parked, and then the security men walked the prisoners inside. They were put into two separate rooms, both of which were empty, and then left in darkness.
28
The building had once been C-Link’s headquarters, years earlier when they were just another startup. It was mostly just a small office building, but there were a couple of larger rooms in the back that were used as laboratories and workshops. The power was still on because the building was occasionally used for storage, but the rooms that were currently being used as cells had once been executive offices. The building had been empty for more than ten years, so there was little inside any of the rooms but dirt and a few pieces of leftover furniture. Rob had made certain there was nothing in the cells that could possibly be used as a weapon before the prisoners were locked in.
They found a few chairs and an old conference table, and brought them into the front lobby. The windows there were boarded over, so they had to turn on the overhead lights to illuminate the room. They brushed off the worst of the dust that had accumulated on the seats and everyone sat down.
“We have now entered what has to be the endgame,” Sam said. “
The triad leader, Fei, probably knows by now that we doublecrossed him, and he’s not going to be happy. The only thing that worries me about that is that he seems to be able to find out a lot of things we don’t think he should. It seems likely that he’s got sources within the police, so it’s also likely he can find out exactly where we’re staying. For that reason, I’ve told Rob to put his people back at the Omni on high alert. If he can’t get to us, his next target is likely Doctor Hu.”
“Then what we need to do is find the bastard,” Pat said. “As dragonhead, he’s going to be absolutely determined to strike back as soon as possible. Just the fact that the doctor has security watching her will be enough to let him know that we found her. That’s going to infuriate him, and it’s likely that he would prefer to kill her and start over, rather than let her turn against him by working with us.”
“I’ve already notified them,” Rob said. “They’re watching closely for anything out of the ordinary.”
“Well, I need to get to work on these two,” Summer said. “I need them immobilized. Rob, any ideas?”
“Give me a couple of minutes,” Rob said. He got up and walked into one of the cells, followed by two of his men. There was a moment of silence, then the sounds of a struggle. A minute later, Rob stepped out and waved a hand to invite Summer inside.
She walked into the room and grinned. They had managed to yank down a couple of ceiling tiles and find the steel framework from which they had been suspended. Now, it was one of the men they had captured who was suspended from it. A pair of handcuffs had been looped over the rail and clamped onto his wrists.
“Damn,” she said. “I bet that hurts.”
The man looked at her for a second, then turned his face away. It was obvious that he was determined not to show any weakness, and yet there was just enough strain in his expression to tell her that she was correct. The steel cuffs were twisting his wrist bones into uncomfortable positions, and cutting off circulation to his hands.