“We’re not a couple,” Gabe said.
“You’ll be back together in a month,” Lukas said.
“¡Ay!” Isabel made to slap the back of Lukas’s head, but he ducked away.
“Can we focus, please?” I said. “These guys are bad news. Grace and I both got knocked out with trank guns.”
“Okay, we need to find out if they’re at the lodge,” Gabe said. “Lukas and I will go check things out.”
“Why you guys?” I asked. “They’re after me, so I should go.”
“That’s exactly why you shouldn’t go,” Gabe said. “We’ll sneak in, poke around, and come back here. What we do next depends on what we find.”
I conceded that plan, and our two groups headed downstream. It took about a half hour to reach the bridge. Gabe and Lukas took off, and while we waited for them to return, Grace took Drew, Isabel, and Sam down to the river to show them how to fish with our net. I sat on the bridge, my legs dangling between two posts as I watched. Arianna came and sat beside me.
“Have you had any prophecies about this?” she asked.
The question took me off guard. No one had ever asked me that before. “I saw myself chased by wolves,” I said. “And yesterday wolves chased us.”
“Have you prayed about it?”
I rubbed my face. “Not really. I prayed for Grace when she got shot with the trank.”
“That’s good, but we should pray for this too. For you and Nick and those guys.”
“Will you?” I asked.
“Absolutely.” She sat down beside me and bowed her head.
****
By the time I caught sight of Lukas and Gabe jogging toward us, the sun was directly overhead. I stood up to meet them and called the others up from the river.
“They’re in the lodge,” Lukas said when they reached the bridge. “They’ve got Mr. S and everyone tied up in there. And some kind of amphibian plane is parked at the dock by the yellow Beaver.”
“The flying boat, that’s theirs,” I said.
“What are we going to do?” Samantha asked.
“We’re going to stay calm,” Gabe said, though he looked pale. “My parents have been in situations like this before. Plus Kimbal is in there, and he’s trained to deal with people like this.”
All that was nice and true, but it didn’t change the fact that those creeps had tied up some innocent people because they were after me.
“We need to turn things around. Trap them here,” I said. “Then call for backup.”
“How are we going to do that?” Arianna asked.
“Move the planes across the lake to start,” I said.
“Move planes?” Arianna said. “I don’t see any pilots here.”
“Lukas can figure it out.” I fished the key from my pocket and handed it to him. “I stole this from the flying boat. You’ll have to figure out where Bill keeps his key.”
“Won’t stealing their plane make them angry?” Isabel asked.
“Probably,” I said. “But we can’t let these creeps get away. I want them caught and fully interrogated.”
Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Until Gabe clapped his hands together and said, “Spencer is right. This is what we’ve trained for. It’s time to step up.”
“Let’s do it,” Lukas said.
“I’m in,” Drew echoed.
“Me too,” Isabel said.
“What else?” Arianna asked. “We’ve got to have more of a plan than stealing their plane.”
“If you’ll let me finish, I’ll tell you,” I said.
“Let the man speak,” Lukas said.
I know it was Lukas talking and it was nothing more than slang, but that moment felt divine. Like God was telling me I could handle this.
I tried to keep calm the way Mr. S, Mr. Sloan, and Itou had been before searching the dojo in Okinawa. “The plan is to call for help. I know that’s not very exciting, but these guys have guns. They’re trained professionals, and I’m not willing to put anyone in danger to try and take them down. Who still has their cell phones in their rooms?”
Arianna, Gabe, and Isabel raised their hands.
“Okay, you girls go get your phones and try to call out. Go to the kennels if you have to. Drew can come with me to get my phone and Gabe’s. Surely one of them will work down there. Mine did before.”
“If they don’t, Mr. Benson has a satphone,” Arianna said.
“Great. Call HQ and let them know what’s happening.”
“You have a number for headquarters?” Isabel asked.
“We’ll call my dad,” Arianna said. “He’ll send out the cavalry.”
“Perfect,” I said. “We’ll meet you at the kennels, then we’ll all come down to the lake and see how you two are coming along with the planes. Plan phase two.”
Gabe nodded. “Sounds good.”
“What about Luke?” Drew asked. “If he’s in trouble and the lanyards aren’t working, he has no way to call for help.”
“El McWilly is going to have to tough it out.” I felt bad for the kid, but we couldn’t go scouring thirty square miles of land for him right now. “We ready?” I looked at the faces circled around me. No one spoke, so I said, “Let’s do this.”
We broke.
****
The sled dogs were barking up a storm by the time Drew and I reached our cabin. It sounded like all 153 were barking at once.
“They probably smell those wolves,” I said.
The front door was open. I grabbed Drew’s arm. “Hold up.”
“You think someone is in there?” he whispered.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Best be quiet.”
We crept through the cabin, but when we got to my room, the door was cracked open and there were sounds coming from inside.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted my phone, but if the girls could get a call out, maybe this wasn’t worth the risk.
Then the door swung fully open, and Nick Muren stood there, my phone in his hand.
Fire shot through me. That was the last straw. The final countdown. I was at the end of my rope. In the heat of the moment, the “Spencer hit the fan,” if you know what I mean.
I tackled him.
Nick and I—we’d fought a couple years ago, and he’d been winning when Isaac had knocked our heads together. Two years later, I had six inches and fifty pounds on him. I also had arms like bricks.
We went down hard with me on top. Nick took the worst of the fall. We both knew League Combat Training, so he quickly put himself into guard, which instantly reminded me where I was messing up.
“You guys,” Drew said. “Hey. Stop, you guys.”
I could hear Boss Schwarz in my head, telling me to relax, that my anger was going to get someone hurt. I kind of wanted to hurt Nick just then, but the LCT training took over, I calmed down enough to be smart, and things quickly started falling into place.
Drew couldn’t read my thoughts, though, and kept slapping us and grabbing our clothes, telling us to stop.
I worked Nick into a front strangle hold. “What are you doing with my phone?” I asked.
“Calling your grandma.”
“Bull. You wanted to make sure I couldn’t call for help.”
“No, you idiot,” Nick rasped, “I was calling your grandma. Because I’m on your side.”
“You sick liar. When have you ever been on my side? I’ve had enough of your psycho games. Why are you helping them? Is this about Kimatra? Are they using her to bribe you?”
That ticked off Nick, who let out a battle cry and bashed his head against mine like he was Chris Pratt. Unlike the action star, this did nothing but hurt like a mother—
A new pain stabbed into a pressure point in my back. I screamed, shocked, and without meaning to or wanting to, I released Nick.
Drew Lusco pulled us apart, holding us by the backs of our shirts. “You guys should really not fight,” he said, brow all scrunched up.
“Where did you learn tha
t?” I asked him.
He released us and handed me my phone. “Nick’s telling the truth.”
I glanced at the screen and saw that my contacts were open to Grandma’s name.
Mother pus bucket.
I didn’t get it. “What’s the deal, Nick? Whose side are you on, anyway?”
He smoothed out his hair. “Mine.”
“Wow, I appreciate how very honest you’re being right now.”
“They have my sister,” he said.
“Faith?”
He nodded, looking embarrassed.
“Who is they?” I asked.
“The people Kimatra works for. I figured you’d know, since they’re after you.”
“Kimatra again.” Just like Brittany Holmes and Kip, no grown woman that hot wasted time with a high school guy unless she had some kind of ulterior motive. “They sent her after me, did you know that?”
“Yeah. She was supposed to pull you into a relationship, then lead you to them. She kept coming around Room 401 but you were always at basketball practice. I thought it would be fun to steal her from you. I had no idea we’d end up together.”
“You actually care about her? Knowing she’s one of them?”
“I love her.”
Dang. “But she’s just using you to get to me.”
Nick shook his head. “It might have started out that way, but that’s not how it is now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because they have her kid.”
Understanding dawned in my mind. “She not pregnant. She was pregnant.”
“What are you talking about, pregnant?” Nick asked.
“I…” I shook my head. “It’s nothing. Uh, how are they tracking me?”
“I planted a GPS locator your left hiking boot. Gave them your sweatshirt so Alcan’s dogs could pick up your scent.”
Alcan’s dogs? “Thanks a lot.” I kicked off my boots, pulled on a dry pair of socks and my sneakers. “You take my intercession journal too?”
“No. Why would I take that?”
Guess I couldn’t blame Nick for everything. “The name Anya ring any bells?” I asked.
“She’s one of the bosses. Met her once. She’s a nut job.”
One of the bosses. “She was in Pilot Point? When?”
“Does it matter right now? They have my sister and they’re going to kill her.”
“Unless?”
“Unless I bring you to them.”
“Ah.”
So here we were again. Anya had been trying to get her hooks into me ever since she’d met me. I looked at Nick then, really looked. At the circles ringing his bloodshot eyes. The hunch of his shoulders. His perpetual pinched brows and frown. This was real. He’d fallen for Kimatra, and it had burned him. I had no doubt at all they’d hurt Faith to get their way.
“So take me to them,” I said.
“Um… That would be insane,” Drew said.
“The kid is right,” Nick said. “I don’t know what these people want with you, but they’re not nice.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Faith is in trouble.”
Nick stared at me, but it wasn’t the hard glare he’d been giving me since the night I ratted him out back in middle school. He looked like he was waiting for the loophole, the contingency, the “what’s in it for Spencer.”
He swallowed, glanced at Drew, then back to me. “Dad said he would call HQ the moment we had her back.”
“Your dad knows about this?”
“He said we had no choice.”
Aiding and abetting kidnappers. Not the kind of behavior you expect from a pastor.
“How long have they had her?” I asked.
“Eleven days. They threatened to do things to her. To hurt her. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have—”
“Yeah, end of discussion,” I said. “I’m in. But I’ll need a back-up plan.”
REPORT NUMBER: 24
REPORT TITLE: We Plot, We Plan, and Get Ready to Fight Back
SUBMITTED BY: Agent-in-Training Spencer Garmond
LOCATION: Mission League training compound, Bear Paw Lake Lodge, Alaska, USA
DATE AND TIME: Sunday, August 5, midday
I used a knife to cut out the GPS locator from my hiking book. Nick had sewed it to the inside tongue. If I was going to do this, I wanted to make sure Faith was okay before I handed myself over. “We need to find some guns,” I said.
“What for?” Drew asked.
“To look like we mean business. I can’t walk in there unarmed. They’ll just trank me again. Game over.”
“They’re out of darts for their trank gun,” Nick said. “Otis is packing a Glock, but I don’t think he’d shoot you.”
Nick being on a first-name basis with my would-be kidnappers threw me for a moment. “It’s clear they want me alive,” I said. “The rest of you . . . I’m not so sure. That why we need to find some guns. We need to scare them.”
“You can’t scare these guys,” Nick said.
“Watch me.” I set the GPS locator on the bedside table, then pocketed my cell phone and Gabe’s too, which I found plugged in on the floor beside his bed. The dogs in the kennel were still going wild. “I wish there was somewhere else we could call from. I don’t like the sound of those dogs. Let’s go to Dusty’s place first and see if we can find a gun and his sat phone.”
Before we left, I flushed the GPS locator down the toilet. Track that, Blondie.
We set out for Dusty’s house, which was a massive log cabin. The front door was unlocked, so we let ourselves in.
“Mr. Benson?” I said, not too loud.
No immediate answer came. The place wasn’t as big on the inside as I’d thought it would be. Like the lodge, the main room had a vaulted ceiling. I glanced around the taxidermied walls, but saw no guns. “I expected a rifle hanging above a door or something,” I said as we crept down the hall.
“He probably locks them up,” Drew said.
I poked my head into an office. Empty. “Why would he do that?” I asked.
“For safety. He runs a training compound. A responsible gun owner would keep his weapons hidden where kids like us couldn’t get them.”
He had a point. “Well, that’s just great,” I said.
We passed two bedrooms, both empty, so we backtracked to the living room.
“You know a lot about guns,” I said to Drew. “If you lived here, where would you hide them?”
His brows sank. “If he has a family, shed out back. If he lives alone, maybe in the basement?”
A quick check of the place revealed no basement. A backdoor led to a workshop. The place was filled with construction tools. Drew’s gaze locked on the far right corner. “There,” he said, nodding toward a black cabinet against the back wall.
It stood about five feet high and was maybe three feet wide, two feet deep. At the upper center of the safe, a chrome, three-spoke steel handle extended under a circular, electronic keypad.
“Dang,” I said.
“That’s a big lock,” Nick said. “He must be paranoid someone is going to steal his guns.”
“Or that a bunch of trained lock-pickers might want to play with them,” I said. But the lock was a problem. “We never covered locks like this in class. Any ideas how to crack open an electronic keypad?”
“I can get into it.” Drew said. “But not by picking the lock.”
“How?” I asked.
“This is a cheap safe, sold at your everyday, everything store. They use lighter, thinner metals and less insulation. Low-quality materials make low-quality safes.”
“It doesn’t look low quality,” I said. It looked impenetrable.
“Oh, it’s not useless, but a smart thief can break into this in under two minutes.”
“And how about you?” I asked. “Are you a smart thief?”
Drew grinned. “I am if I can find a crowbar, but it will ruin his safe.”
“The Mission League can buy him a new one,”
I said. “Go for it.”
Drew found a five-foot long monster pry bar. “I’ll need help pulling it out from the wall.”
The three of us rocked the safe from side to side, rattling the contents with each motion. We turned it completely around, and Drew said, “Push it over.”
We pushed. The safe landed on its back on the cement floor with a bang that sent up a cloud of dust.
Drew wedged his pry bar into the seam where the door met the side. He pulled back and down. I couldn’t believe it, but the metal door actually started to warp.
I found a pry bar with a chisel on one side and started helping. Nick grabbed a shorter crowbar and took position on Drew’s other side.
“Where did you learn to do this?” I asked, wedging my pry bar into the widening seam.
“At a gun show with my dad. Some guy did a demonstration on a couple of discount brand safes. Then he took volunteers from the audience to show us that anyone could do this. I volunteered.”
The three of us hoodlums had completely bent the safe’s door and created a gaping crack. We shoved our bars deep into the crevice, and on my count of three, we pushed down. The metal groaned, bent, then popped free of the bolts and bounced back against our bars like the door of a high school locker.
Nick whooped. I laughed. Drew threw back the door and revealed the contents of Dusty Benson’s gun safe.
On the right side, a pile of long guns lay on top of each other like pencils in a box. Some of them looked like hunting rifles and some were solid black, like machine guns. There must have been thirty. A row of shelves on the far left had once held ammo, which now lay in a jumble amongst the guns. On the back of the door, black nylon holsters held all kinds of handguns.
I whistled. “That’s a lot of firepower. What do you recommend, Drew?”
He bent over the guns, moved some aside, and picked up one of the black rifles that had a scope on top. “This is a nice weapon. AR15 trainer, equipped with lasers.” He handed it to Nick, then picked up a shotgun with a wooden stock. “870 Remington Express, pump action shotgun.” He passed it to me.
“Are those non-lethal rounds?” I asked.
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