Nest

by Terry Goodkind

  “I’m going to do that. Stay on the line with me.”

  “Do something! Don’t just talk to me! You need to do something!”

  “I already am, Kate. You need to trust me.”

  The woman’s voice sounded calm and controlled. Tears running down her face, Kate nodded. “All right. What do you want me to do?”

  “Do you have any idea of where you are?”

  “No. It’s a basement of a big building. They had me duct-taped to a chair.”

  “Okay, you need to stay on the phone so we can find you.”

  “This phone doesn’t have GPS.”

  “That doesn’t matter. We’re already on it. Can you see if you can find a door for me? See if you can find a way out of the basement?”

  Kate nodded as she looked around in the darkness. “I’ll try.”

  “Just don’t hang up. Even if you say something and I don’t answer, I will still be here on the line. I’m trying to get you some help. Just don’t hang up.”

  “I won’t,” Kate said with a sob of relief as she started down a hallway. There were pipes high up along one wall. She followed them through the darkness, her small flashlight showing her the way. Jack’s flashlight showing her the way.

  He had to be all right. He just had to.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Kate pushed open the heavy door. It scraped against dirt and rubble. Before her was a cement stairway filled with papers and garbage. It led up to an alley. At the top she stopped and carefully looked around.

  “Dvora, I’m out. I’m outside. I’m in an alley.”

  “Can you see anything noteworthy?”

  Kate looked around. “No. I can tell you that it’s not the kind of neighborhood you’d want to be lost in at night.”

  “I understand,” Dvora said, sounding distracted as she also whispered something off to the side Kate couldn’t hear.

  “There’s a lot of scaffolding all along the street side of the building I was in. At the curb there are a couple of burned-out cars with no wheels up on blocks. There are coils of razor wire on the tops of some of the fences and walls.”

  “Do me a favor, Kate.”

  “What’s that?” Kate asked as she looked out of the alley up and down the dark street. There were gangs of men on the corners to either end of the block. Their body language told her she was right about the neighborhood.

  “Kate, I want you to step back in the alley and stay out of sight. Can you do that?”

  “Why?” Kate asked as she moved back into the dark alley.

  “Because I see your location and you were right about the area. We don’t need any complications right now. I want you to stay out of sight. Help is on the way.”

  “It is?” Kate was a bit surprised. Her hopes soared. “Thank you, Dvora. Please tell them to hurry. Do you know where Jack is?”

  “Not yet. Just stay back out of sight. We almost have you.”

  Almost had her? Those words nearly made Kate break down, but she held it together.

  All of a sudden, a black SUV squealed around the corner, nosed partway into the alley, and slammed on the brakes. The passenger door popped open.

  “Kate, he’s there. Get in the vehicle.”

  Kate leaped up and jumped into the front seat. Even as she was pulling the door closed, the driver was backing out of the alley. As the men standing on the corners to either side started swarming in toward them, he put the truck in drive and shot away.

  “He’s got you,” Dvora said. “You’re in safe hands now.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said.

  “Shalom.” The line went dead.

  Kate looked over at the driver. He gave her a brave kind of smile and extended a hand across the armrest.

  “I am Gilad Ben-Ami,” he said. He was middle-aged and had neat salt-and-pepper hair, a goatee, and a perfectly tailored gray suit. The knot of his dark red tie had a collar pin under it.

  Kate took his hand. “Kate Bishop.”

  “I know,” he said. “We are grateful to you and Jack.”

  “Are you the police?”

  “No,” he said with a kind of knowing smile. “I am a diplomat. At the UN. Here in the city.”

  “Diplomat.” Kate had been around security long enough to know what that meant. “Mossad.”

  He shrugged, noncommittally.

  “Better than the police,” she said.

  He smiled at that. By the way he looked her up and down, at what a bloody mess she was, she knew that he was concerned for her health. She didn’t care about that.

  “Do you know where he is? Have you found him yet?”

  “Not yet. We’re pinging his phone. You told Dvora that you and Jack were drugged?”

  “Yes. A killer named Victor that Jack had seen before had me down in that basement. He told me that someone else was going to kill Jack.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “My arms were taped to a chair. The guy likes to saw off women’s legs, so my legs weren’t tied down. He films it and posts the videos.” Kate pulled the SD card from her pocket, held it up for him for a second and then dropped it in a tray in the center console.

  “When he had his back turned, fiddling with the camera, I was able to run up behind him and throw a leg around his head, twist it, and break his neck.”

  Gilad arched an eyebrow. “Smart thinking.”

  Kate looked down at her trembling hands. They were bloody. “I saw Jack do that before. That’s what gave me the idea. He did that to kill a man who was trying to kill me.”

  Gilad nodded as he raced down a street, going through a red light. “We taught him that. Do you have any idea who could have him, or where?”

  “I think this woman, Shannon Blare, has him. She’s his editor, and I think she was using him without his knowledge to find people like me. He told me one time that he couldn’t figure out how these killers were getting to people he found with my ability before he could help them. I think she was the way they were doing it.”

  He nodded as he let out an unhappy sigh. “This is bad business.”

  The phone rang. He pushed a button on the steering wheel to answer it.

  A voice said “The phone he made the call on from the airport is in your car.”

  Gilad cursed in Hebrew, then said “Okay” and hung up.

  “Jack split up our phones,” Kate said, her heart sinking. “He gave me one to carry. It must have been the one he used at O’Hare.”

  “What can you tell me about this woman, this Shannon Blare? Can you tell me anything?”

  Kate recognized an investigator asking critical questions, even if this one did have a thick accent.

  They raced past little markets, liquor stores, bars, and crowds of people hanging around on street corners, smoking. Blocky brick buildings rose up to either side.

  “She’s an editor,” Kate said, trying to focus. “But Jack said the job is just a hobby for her. I think her job was an excuse, a way to use him. He said she’s wealthy, travels in a limo all the time, and she likes to buy buildings. I think he mentioned high-rises. She must be some kind of property owner for her main business.”

  Kate’s mind was already racing to put all the pieces together.

  She looked over at him. “Can you find out what buildings she owns and if any of them are empty, like maybe they’re being remodeled?”

  Gilad pressed a button on the steering wheel for the phone. When someone answered, they spoke to each other in Hebrew, so Kate didn’t know what they were saying, but she recognized the names Jack Raines and Shannon Blare, and she heard the urgency in the voices and the clipped clarity.

  After a brief wait, the person on the other end of the line came back with two addresses.

  Gilad cut around a corner, squealing the tires. “We’re lucky,” he said as they picked up speed. “They aren’t too far and the traffic is light this time of night. This woman owns and rents out property. She purchased two buildings late last year.
They are near one another and both being renovated.”

  Gilad checked his mirrors and stepped on the gas.

  As they raced down the street, cutting through the traffic, sometimes taking to an empty oncoming lane, he looked over at her. “How well do you know Jack Raines?”

  Kate’s brow wrinkled. She was hardly able to keep it together enough to get the words out.

  “I’m in love with him.”

  She loved him and had never told him.

  “Ah” was all Gilad said, but that said it all.

  Gilad made another call. He gave brief instructions and the two addresses. Kate couldn’t understand the words but she recognized that he was calling for backup.

  The drive seemed to take forever, but he finally skidded to a stop at the curb in front of a brick building. A dented Dumpster sat on the sidewalk outside and plastic covered the dark windows. Gilad turned to her and pointed a finger up at the place. “This is one of the buildings.” He pointed a thumb back across the street. “That’s the other one.”

  Kate already had her hand on the door handle. “Let’s go.”

  “No,” he said. “You wait here. I’m going to go in and search this one. Help is on the way. It will be here any moment. After I look in here, I will go check the other one. You wait here, please.”

  “Like hell,” Kate said as she opened the door and jumped out. She looked back in. “While you check this building I’ll go across the street to look in the other one.”

  It was obvious that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of it. He tried anyway.

  “Wait—I have backup on the way.”

  “Good,” she said as she started running. “If you don’t find him, come find me.”

  Across the street, the second building looked in bad shape. The outside was encased in a web of scaffolding pipe and a lot of plastic. Planks among the pipes made levels of walkways high up in the air. The sidewalk was boarded off to keep people from being killed by falling rubble.

  She didn’t see anyone on the street.

  Kate ran along the wooden fence to the alley. It was dark, wet, and lined with dumpsters.

  She ran into the alley, looking for a way to get into the building. She found two steel doors but they were both locked. She stumbled to a stop when she saw a low window with the corner broken out. She carefully reached in, unlatched the lock, then pushed the rusty window open.

  She shined her flashlight in and saw that it was about a six-foot drop to a floor littered with dirt and crumbled debris.

  Kate slipped her feet through first and jumped in.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-NINE

  Kate landed on her feet as lightly and quietly as possible. The flashlight revealed square, concrete support columns at regular intervals. Overhead were webs of pipes and ductwork draped with filthy cobwebs. She made her way across the room, trying to rush, trying to do it quietly. Crumbled debris crunched under her feet, echoing through the darkness.

  She paused, listening for voices, but it was dead quiet.

  On the far side of the room she found a broad opening into another section of the basement. Once through the opening, she thought she heard something to the left. She followed the sounds deeper into the dark wasteland.

  After going for quite some distance, she rounded a corner to abruptly find herself beside the driver’s side of a stretch limo parked in the near darkness. Ahead of it a ramp rose quite a ways up to the street level, where there was a closed metal garage door. A single fluorescent fixture high up near the door provided weak light in the sea of darkness below.

  It was too late to be careful. The driver had already seen her.

  “Hey!” he yelled as he bounded out of the car, reaching under his suit jacket for a knife in a sheath on his belt. He hesitated for an instant. “You?”

  He obviously recognized her. Kate certainly recognized the murderous look in his eyes.

  He was probably one of the men who had carried her and Jack out of the hotel, no doubt out of a service elevator and back-alley entrance. Kate was sure that Shannon Blare, who got them that particular room, had it all planned out and prearranged. They walked right into her trap.

  The driver was a burly man with greasy black hair combed over to one side. Before he was fully standing, before he had fully drawn the knife, Kate was already in the kill zone. A lightning-quick strike sliced open the side of his neck. By the jet of blood she knew she’d hit the carotid artery, but she rapidly slashed it again for good measure.

  His killer eyes widened as shock and panic froze him in place. Blood erupted from under his hand at his throat. In mere seconds she could see in his eyes that he was rapidly losing consciousness.

  Kate kicked him over. He slammed heavily to the floor beside the car. She leaned into the limo and quickly searched around inside. She opened the center armrest and glove box, looking for a gun, but didn’t find one. She saw a garage-door opener on the visor.

  She knew that if she pressed the button, the metal door would make a racket as it opened, but maybe no one was close enough to hear it, or they might think the driver had opened it for something.

  If the door was open, not only would Gilad have a way in, it would give him a good idea of where she was. The body beside the limo at the bottom of the ramp would certainly confirm that they were in the right place.

  Kate pressed the button. The metal door clattered as it began to open, but it wasn’t as loud as she had feared.

  As she turned, her flashlight revealed footprints in the dirt and debris all around the car. She spotted drag marks leading away from the back door of the limo.

  A sense of desperate hope flashed through her at knowing that those drag marks would be from them pulling Jack out of the car and dragging him to the place where they likely intended to torture information out of him before they slaughtered him.

  Kate followed the swerving tracks of the drag marks and footprints back into the depths of the basement. They led to a concrete stairwell on the far side of the room. She hurried down the steps into the bowels of the decrepit building. It stank of mildew and rancid oil.

  At the bottom she leaned out and saw light ahead among the support columns, ductwork, and the building systems equipment layered with dirt. The drag marks wove their way among the machinery toward the light.

  With her vision adjusted to the darkness, Kate switched off her light, put it in her back pocket, and took out her second knife. The blade snapped open with a soft metallic snick.

  As she came around a large, square support column, she suddenly spotted Jack. She gasped.

  He was hanging on a rope by his wrists. The rope went up through a pulley at the ceiling and then to a cleat on the wall, where it was tied off.

  Jack was without a shirt and covered in blood and angry red wounds. His feet swayed a few inches off the floor.

  Kate’s heart was beating so hard she could feel herself rock back and forth.

  She quickly peered around but didn’t see anyone. She knew, though, that there had to be people around. Either they were back in the shadows, or maybe they had gone off for some reason. If they were gone, this was her best chance. She might not get another.

  She ran for the rope tied to the wall.

  “Kate! Behind you!” Jack shouted.

  Kate spun in time to see a big man reaching out to grab her. She hammered her knives into his eyes with a one-two punch. As he screamed with an ear-piercing shriek and his hands came up to cover his face, Kate swept her blade across his abdomen. His intestines spilled partway out and then began unfolding down toward his feet.

  Kate immediately turned back to Jack, dangling helpless at the end of the rope.

  “Move!” Jack screamed.

  Kate instantly understood and dove to the side as a woman in a dark pantsuit across the room fired a gun. The sound of the gun going off in the basement was deafening. Kate heard the bullet hit the floor right beside her. She immediately rolled the other way as the woman f
ired again. The sound of the gunshots echoed through the basement, but the shot missed.

  Kate rolled back to her feet and frantically ran in a zigzag as fast as she could, back and forth, denying the woman a clear shot, all the time racing closer.

  As she dodged to the side, running past a square column for cover, an arm reached out and lifted her from her feet. It was a sweaty man in a black sleeveless undershirt. Kate stabbed a knife down in each side of the man’s bull neck several times, as fast as she could. She knew that it wasn’t a fatal strike, but it cut muscle and surprised him enough to drop her. As she fell toward the floor, she stuck a blade in his thigh and dragged it down with her, laying his thigh muscle open.

  When the woman fired at Kate again, the shot instead hit the man in the center of his back. By the way he immediately went down, the bullet must have hit his heart and killed him instantly.

  Kate sprang over the man, using her foot on his body to help her push into a dead run. As Kate raced in to close the distance in time, the woman urgently turned the gun toward Jack.

  “Enough of this.”

  She fired four quick shots into Jack as Kate screamed, “NO!”

  Shannon Blare swung the gun back toward Kate, but Kate was already there. She snatched the woman’s gun hand as she raced in, twisted violently under it, breaking the woman’s wrist. She spun the arm around behind and used her leverage to flip the woman through the air.

  Shannon Blare slammed down hard on her back with a grunt. Kate’s full weight came down on a knee to the center of the woman’s chest, driving the rest of the wind from her lungs.

  Kate had stripped the gun from Shannon Blare’s hand when she flipped her over. She gripped the gun in both hands, pointing it down at the center of the woman’s face.

  The defiant eyes of a killer looked up at her.

  Kate pulled the trigger four times.

  With the cement floor right under her head, the bullets fragmented and blew out the back of the skull, spraying blood and brain matter across the floor. The sound of the shots echoed through the basement.

  As Kate scrambled to her feet she heard shots, but these were different. It was a burst of full-auto fire, three shots in the span of a fraction of a second.