Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set

by Carla Cassidy

  “What’s on that?” Jennifer asked a few moments later. Christina had finally gotten a little bit of sleep, making a palette in her office as her computer ran searches on autopilot. Her eyes were still squinted, trying to focus after being woken up so quickly.

  Lara shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Something the bomber gave his new target.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Christina said, eyes widening. She turned tail and hurried down the hallway. James, Xander and Ty ran into the bullpen.

  “Is that the target?” Ty asked, motioning to the man in the conference room.

  “When did our timeline start?” James asked on the tail end of Ty’s question.

  Before she could answer either with a yes and an “I don’t know” Nick was back. There was a laptop under his arm.

  “He got it with the morning paper but didn’t see it until an hour ago.”

  Lara’s stomach knotted. Her adrenaline spiked. Both feelings creating an anxiety only her job seemed able to produce. The “oh shit” and “we need to get moving” gut reactions.

  The rest of the team seemed to be on the same wavelength. They moved into the conference room. No one sat down. Nick placed the laptop on the table and booted it up.

  “This is Trevor Dunbar,” he said. “A handwritten note was scrawled on his morning paper. In the newspaper was a flash drive. He didn’t see it until an hour ago and had cold feet about coming in because, apparently, he’s got one hell of a secret.”

  Everyone took a beat to stare at the man. Lara tried to reserve her judgment. What she said to Ty was true. She had secrets, hell they probably all did, so how could she judge him for having one, too? Especially after Victoria’s had been a secret that, in Lara’s mind at least, hadn’t painted her as a terrible person.

  Still, from the way Dunbar shrank back into his chair, his eyes never landing on theirs, and the obvious shadow of shame across his expression, Lara doubted his secret had put an evil man behind bars.

  “I might have a secret but I’m not a monster,” was all Dunbar said on the matter. The laptop finished booting up. Lara handed Nick the flash drive while the rest of the team gathered around him.

  Nick almost had the drive into the computer when the sound of someone yelling made him stop.

  “Don’t you dare put that in there,” Christina shrieked. She ran into the room and took the flash drive from him so quickly that he didn’t have time to react. Christina took a step back and, chest heaving up and down, explained. “Our bomber is a technological freak of nature. He could have uploaded a genius virus to it or some backdoor program that could tank our systems and network. Or even worse, some sort of malware that could get into our system and allow him access to everything the FBI has.” She motioned to her own laptop, tucked at her side. It was old. Lara didn’t have to be a tech genius to see that. It was like a silver-painted brick.

  Christina set it down.

  “And over my dead body will I let him have access to my system.” She motioned to the laptop.

  “I opened it on my laptop,” Dunbar said.

  Christina, for the first time, seemed to acknowledge the man’s presence. She wasn’t impressed.

  “That was a stupid thing to do,” she said matter-of-factly. Dunbar opened his mouth but Lara cut his response off.

  “So if there’s a virus or program on it, our system will be safe if you open it on that?” she asked.

  Christina grinned and patted the laptop. “The Wi-Fi connection doesn’t work on this. So, if there’s anything on it, it’s staying right here.” Christina took a deep breath. “Okay, are we ready?”

  “Yes,” Nick said.

  “Ready,” Lara confirmed.

  They closed in around Christina as she inserted the flash drive. A video file named “Watch Me” was the only thing on it. She looked up at Lara, who nodded, and then double-clicked it.

  Lara couldn’t help it. She held her breath.

  The screen filled with grainy footage. Black-and-white and indiscernible grays. It took a moment for an image to focus.

  “A warehouse?” Jennifer offered.

  “An abandoned one at that,” Xander added.

  They were both right. The inside of the building was utterly nondescript. No recognizable features. Just wide-open space, what looked like concrete flooring and run-down walls.

  “But why?” Nick asked.

  Dunbar cleared his throat. “Just wait,” he said, sounding impossibly small.

  Then, as if his words alone conjured it, the camera panned down, and they saw what was the heart of the video.

  In the middle of the screen was a chair. In that chair sat a man. The lighting was bad but not bad enough that Lara couldn’t see that his arms, legs, chest and hands were tied to the chair with rope. The shadow of a gag was across his mouth, too. While that in itself was startling, what made Lara’s hair stand on end was what was hanging around him.

  Cell phones. Hundreds of them.

  Cell phones, dangling on strings from the ceiling she hadn’t noticed on the first shot. Their flashes kept going off every few seconds. It created the effect of strobe lighting.

  And then Lara recognized the man.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, leaning in closer. “That’s him. That’s our selfie guy.” The cell phone camera flashes and the grainy quality of the video was bad at best but she was sure of it.

  “There’s something on his chest,” James pointed out.

  They waited a few seconds before the flashes worked to their advantage.

  “It’s a bomb, with a timer,” Nick bit out. “And it’s counting down.”

  “He’s holding something,” Christina said.

  They waited again.

  “It’s a sign,” Lara said, getting so close to the screen she was almost touching it. Finally the printed words came into view. Lara balled her fist and read them to the team.

  “‘The choice is yours.’”

  * * * * *

  The game has changed, and so have the rules. Well, Lara is not in the mood for games. She wants to put the Whisperer out of commission—now. But will Nick let her do what needs to be done to stop the bomber, or will his new role as coleader of the CMU keep him playing by the rules? She hopes Nick has her back—because this could get ugly, real fast...

  TOUGH JUSTICE:

  COUNTDOWN

  (Part 4 of 8)

  Emmy Curtis

  Everyone has secrets. Everyone is vulnerable.

  As tensions mount within the Crisis Management Unit, Special Agent Lara Grant’s relationships with her fellow agents fray as they race to find a hostage taken by the bomber. But as the next high-profile target rejects the bomber’s demands, it seems like nothing can save the innocent victim. A chance bit of evidence leads the CMU to a warehouse Lara knows all too well from her last case. But will they arrive in time to prevent another murder?

  Part 4 of 8: an explosive new installment in the thrilling FBI serial from New York Times bestselling author Carla Cassidy and Tyler Anne Snell, Emmy Curtis and Janie Crouch.

  For Tahra Seplowin, who got me to the starting line.

  Contents

  Episode Four

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Episode Four

  The Whisperer has Selfie Guy—and has strapped a bomb to his chest with a timer! The CMU is upping their game, but every lead they’ve taken to find the hostage is a dead end. Dunbar won’t tell his secret—condemning Selfie Guy to a sure death if they can’t find him. The countdown is on...

  Chapter One

  “The choice is yours.”

  The irony was stro
ng, but the fear on Selfie Guy’s face blew the thought from Lara’s mind. Her gaze met Nick’s and she was pretty sure the shock in his eyes matched hers.

  This was not what they expected. At all.

  They both returned their gaze to the image on the laptop and took in the tableau that seemed designed to scare the crap out of someone like Selfie Guy. And if she were being honest—herself, too. The dangling cell phones set to flash was like something out of a horror movie, the video frame designed to make the bare warehouse completely unidentifiable. She hoped the poor guy wasn’t epileptic. Yup—he’d gone from pain-in-the-ass to poor guy in less than a day. The bomb strapped to his chest had helped.

  “This...this isn’t...what is this?” Lara asked under her breath. This...staged freak show was so outside of the bomber’s MO, so unexpected, so not in the profile.

  “It’s just sick,” Christina said. “That’s what it is.” She spoke from beneath the hand that had flown to her mouth as soon as the image had become clear.

  The digital numbers on the detonator were counting down. It said exactly 23 hours. But when was this recorded? “Does the USB footage have a digital timer? Do we know how long ago this was filmed? How do we know this wasn’t from two days ago?” Nick asked.

  The technical questions snapped Christina from her trance. “Right. Yes. Give me a moment.” She made a few keystrokes. “The file was loaded eight hours ago. So—”

  “Zoom in on the message,” Nick said, pointing at the screen.

  Lara frowned, and bent closer to the laptop to see what he’d noticed.

  Christina zoomed in on the screen and they watched as the note enlarged.

  Nick picked up an evidence bag with the newspaper in which Trevor Dunbar had claimed the USB had been hidden. “Look.”

  The note had been written with a Sharpie on the front page of this morning’s newspaper. The same edition that was in Nick’s hands.

  A trickle of relief pulsed through Lara. “So we have...how many hours to find him?”

  “It’s light outside the warehouse—look you can see the window at the top. So it can’t have been filmed earlier than...when was sunrise today?” Nick asked.

  Xander flipped open the weather app on his phone. “Zero five fifty-four,” he said.

  “Okay, so we’ve lost nine hours. Someone give us a countdown,” Nick said.

  Christina scraped her chair back and flipped a digital countdown on one of the many screens on the wall. It started at fifteen. Then flipped to 14:59:59 as if it were taunting them with the second they’d already lost. Lara shook her head at the missing hours they no longer had to work with, really wanting to punch Dunbar. What had he been doing for all those freaking hours?

  “Why don’t I take Mr. Dunbar to a separate room? We can chat there.” Jennifer stood up, smiling at Dunbar, obviously eager to get involved, but not wanting to wait to be assigned something like sifting through paperwork.

  Nick hesitated. His father’s colleague was sweating bullets. He must know something. Lara had seen Nick take away Dunbar’s phone when he’d first come in, so all he’d have to entertain himself in an interrogation room would be the mirror.

  Lara didn’t wait for Nick to reply. After all, technically she was joint-chief. “Yes. Good idea. See what you can get out of him.” She thought that he might react better to Jennifer than to Nick. After all, Nick wouldn’t be able to help himself but to bring his animosity toward his father into the interrogation room and she could imagine how that might shut Dunbar down. He seemed the type that would open up more to a stranger. Jennifer escorted Dunbar out of the conference room.

  “I’ll take him to interview one,” she said over her shoulder.

  “See if he has any knowledge of a warehouse, or if anyone he’s represented has warehouses. Any kind of connection,” Lara asked. Jennifer flipped her notebook toward Lara, and pointed at the third bullet point. “Already got it, boss...es.” She pulled a face at her tiny faux pas, and hurried out of the room.

  “Why Selfie Guy?” Xander asked as soon as Dunbar was gone. “He’s got zero connection to BrainWave, as far as we know. Although, he wasn’t exactly forthcoming about who he was and why he was taking photos of the crime scenes. We really don’t have a whole lot to go on. None of this makes sense.” He took a seat at the conference room table. Lara noticed that he had taken Mei’s old seat. Her eyes flicked to Ty to see if he would react. They’d been keeping her seat open since she’d been murdered the year earlier. She couldn’t even tell if he’d noticed. Maybe not being in the running for section chief had given him a wake-up call about accepting that Mei was no longer with them.

  As soon as the image had flickered up on the screen, Lara’s instinct had been to dash to Victoria’s office and update her. But Victoria was no longer with them because of this dirtbag getting his kicks from messing with them.

  “His name’s Benjamin Johnson,” Xander said, reading from an NYPD surveillance file. He punched the name into his rough BrainWave database. “Nothing from BrainWave, and according to the surveillance team, no evidence that he was ever of interest to the police.”

  “Wait, who’s Ben Johnson?” Nick asked, distracted.

  “Selfie Guy.” He shook the paper file. “Surveillance report. Ben Johnson works at Best Buy in the cell phone department. According to coworkers, he started testing the phone cameras, then set up a website after he found himself at the scene of the first bombing. Oh, God. Let me look.” He keyed into his laptop, then sat back shaking his head. “Well now I know why he was a target.” He pressed a function key and mirrored his laptop to the main screen in the room.

  “Ugh. Selfiebomber dot com?” Lara breathed. Her gaze flicked back to the terrified man on Christina’s screen. “Talk about bad decisions.”

  “It doesn’t matter why he’s the target, all that matters is that we find him in the next fifteen hours,” Nick said authoritatively.

  Wow he’s really taking jockeying for Victoria’s replacement seriously. Lara bit back a grin. She loved her team, but she still didn’t trust herself to make the real team decisions. Not so long ago, she’d thought that she could see herself in Victoria’s chair one day, but now she wasn’t too sure. She still wanted to protect them too much, to keep them away from her and the world of hurt she usually brought down on everyone. Her mind flickered away from the screen and onto the chair that Xander had taken. Mei was gone. Gone because of Lara, and the bad decision she made. She would never consider Mei’s murder anything other than her fault.

  “Ty. Can you brief Dr. Oliviero and see if he can update his profile given this new victim?” Nick asked. “And we can’t forget that Dunbar is also a victim...of sorts.”

  “So why Selfie Guy—Mr. Johnson, I mean—and why Victoria, come to that?” she asked.

  “I’m going back to BrainWave,” Xander replied. “Neither Dunbar, Victoria nor Ben have any connection at all to BrainWave from what we can tell. But I’m still convinced that the company is at the center of this.”

  “Agreed,” Lara said. She’d thought so, too. The company was so small, it was beyond a coincidence that two bombing victims had also been employees. “Get over there—see what you can find out. The rest of us, we need to find Mr. Johnson.” She looked at the countdown clock. “We now have less than fifteen hours.”

  * * *

  Nick left the team, intent on getting his five minutes with Dunbar. He beckoned Jennifer from the room. “I’m going in. Feel free to come in and send me out when you think I’ve gone too far.” He didn’t give her the benefit of time to formulate a response, but strode into the interview room, bashing the door against the wall with a bang.

  It gave him a small measure of satisfaction that Dunbar jumped clean out of his seat. “Hello, Trevor,” he said in the same smarmy voice that his father and Dunbar habitually used.

  Dunb
ar winced. “Nick.”

  “You waited eight hours? You saw that someone was in danger, he had a bomb strapped to him, goddamn it, and decided to wait eight hours to show someone?”

  “That’s not what happened. I didn’t see it until about an hour ago when I had a minute between meetings for a cup of coffee. I took the folded paper from my briefcase and found this taped to page three.”

  “Tell me, Trevor. What were you doing between the time you saw the video, and the time I saw you on the steps of this building? Damage control? Rearranging assets? Persuading people to keep quiet?” Nick seethed with disgust and distrust. Somewhere inside, he knew he was shouting at his father, not Dunbar, but they were so similar in so many ways, it ceased to matter.

  “Who are you protecting?” As he said the words, a cold finger of dread flickered down his spine. He recoiled a little as he entertained the thought that it might be Nick’s father he was protecting.

  As if Dunbar could see Nick’s thoughts, he gave a half smile, but remained silent.

  Jesus—could that be it? But then why wouldn’t the threat have been sent to his father? Nick turned away from him and blew out his cheeks. First, his father wouldn’t have flinched before sacrificing any number of innocent people to protect himself and his reputation, and second, wouldn’t Dunbar have told him if the USB drive had been sent to his father? Maybe. Maybe not. He’d known his father’s cronies long enough to know that most of them owed his father something or another. It wouldn’t surprise him at all to find out that Dunbar was taking one for the team.

  “You have to find him, Nick. The alternative is unthinkable,” Dunbar said.

  “For who?” Nick all but rolled his eyes at him.

  He looked away. “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Nick exploded and thumped the table, making Dunbar’s coffee spill. “You won’t be at liberty at all unless you speak.”

  Dunbar jumped again, but his voice remained calm, if a little shaky. “I won’t speak out, and I certainly won’t let the New York Times publish my secret. So you have two options, Nick. You find this man with the bomb attached to him, or you lose him in what is certain to be a well-publicized failure of the New York City police, and the FBI.”