Snow Blind

by Jim Heskett

  Voices drifted from down a hallway, so he holstered the pistol and drew a knife. If he had to kill them, better to do it one at a time, quietly.

  But then, if he killed them, he would still have nothing. Even if he eliminated all but one and took the last one hostage, there was no reason to think he’d glean any useful info from the remaining hostile.

  For these people to have eliminated all the assassins who’d arrived yesterday suggested they were a professional team. Efficient and ruthless. Layne knew he couldn't face them and expect to survive long.

  There had to be a better way.

  He pressed forward along a set of hallways winding through the lodge. Up ahead was Victoria’s office, and Layne heard voices wafting out of the room.

  He ducked into a nearby maintenance closet until he could be sure which way the voices were moving. As he waited, an image of his daughter played in front of his face, helped along by the blurriness in his snow-blind eyes. Cameron, dancing in the living room of his Boulder apartment while the music from some little kid show trickled out of her iPad’s speakers. How she would giggle every time she spun around.

  And how her giggle would make Layne giggle, like a doctor bonking a rubber mallet against his knee to test his reflexes.

  A moment later, the voices intensified. They were still inside Victoria’s office. Layne could detect two of them, and the way their voices rose and fell, they were in motion, lifting things or rearranging.

  “Two minutes,” one guy said. “We’re due back by the afternoon.”

  “Alright,” said the other one. “I’m all set here. Let’s close it up.”

  They continued chatting as their voices dissipated, traveling in the opposite direction. A nearby door shut.

  As soon as the voices had faded, and another door shut, Layne left the closet and scurried down the hall. He threw back the door to Victoria’s office.

  At first glance, it seemed normal. Just as the last time he’d seen it.

  “Okay, Layne,” he muttered to himself. “Be systematic. What were they doing in here? You heard them shuffling through stuff. So, they were looking for something.”

  He trailed around the room, struggling to recall what he could picture from his two visits here, both times being disciplined by Victoria. Everything looked the same. Standard office paraphernalia. As much as he tried, he couldn’t find anything missing. The file cabinets and pictures on the walls and all the other minutiae were still present.

  But what if they weren’t trying to steal something, they were trying to plant something? Layne thought about how they’d arranged the bodies outside, like criminals covering their tracks by staging a crime scene.

  He focused on the stacks of papers and file folders on the desk and tried to remember if those had been here before. At first, he had no way to know, but then, it hit him.

  The lack of heat.

  He removed a glove from one hand and traced the back of his knuckle over the file folders. With the heat off, they should all feel cold to the touch.

  Except one folder wasn’t cold. Compared to the surface of the desk, this felt warmer, as if it had been shoved down the back of someone’s pants or traveled in a comfy backpack until a couple minutes ago.

  The men had left it here.

  Layne flipped it open to find a shipping manifest for a boat that had set out from a pier in Puget Sound, six months ago. One of the voyages that had brought down the two men currently indicted for trafficking.

  This document was meant to link Victoria to them.

  Now, everything made sense.

  Victoria Overton had been murdered and her body removed. Then, the rest of the guests here were massacred. With Grant and Rudy, as well as Victoria, conspicuously absent, that could make her a suspect in the murders of these guests. Also, Serena’s target, the man known as Z, was formerly married to Victoria. But, they’d had a nasty divorce.

  Layne drew in a breath as a realization hit him.

  They were likely both involved in the child slave trade. If they had split the business in the divorce, it would make sense for Z to want to pin it all on Victoria. To distance himself from it.

  Z was now a trafficker from a rival organization, and all of this chaos had been to push his competitor—and ex-wife—out of the game, while making her the subject of a police investigation to draw the heat. She couldn’t refute the claims if she were nowhere to be found.

  Layne’s instinct told him to snatch his pistols and race out to kill the assassins before they could leave on their snowcat. But that earned him nothing.

  Today, a boat full of children was leaving someplace nearby, to spend their foreseeable futures as slaves. Layne and his team still didn’t know where that boat would be, or where it was going.

  Layne grinned. Instead of a frontal assault, he came up with a much better idea.

  INTERLUDE 5

  London | Six years ago

  Rifle in his hands, standing over the dead body of his teammate Alicia, Layne makes a decision. To hell with his orders. Daphne forced him to let a Chevy Suburban full of human slaves escape, which effectively has killed them. The women inside that car are now doomed to spend the next few days locked in the belly of a ship as they speed across the ocean to become the property of some entitled asshole. If they even survive the trip, that is.

  The damp alley still ricochets with sound. Echo of tires screeching. The ringing after-effects of the weapons fire.

  Layne’s not going to stand by and let these women become resigned to their fate. He breaks into a sprint toward the car stashed beyond the lip of the alley.

  “Boy Scout,” barks Oleg’s voice in his ear. “Get back here.”

  Layne opts not to respond. Instead, he slings the AR-15 over his shoulder and fishes car keys out of his pocket. He opens the remote lock on the BMW and yanks open the door. By instinct, he’s opened the left side door, so he has to scoot across to get behind the wheel on the right side of the BMW.

  As he revs the engine and screams out of the parking spot, Daphne and Oleg wail at him. How he’s deliberately ignoring important mission protocols, how they have to debrief and plan for the next phase as soon as possible.

  How there is more work to do here in the alley. He knows what they mean by this. They mean cleaning up Alicia’s bullet-riddled body.

  Layne doesn’t worry about any of those concerns. All he knows is that he has to catch up to the SUV full of captives before their driver can hustle them to a warehouse somewhere. Some impersonal transfer facility where they will be tossed into a darkened cage and then sent out to parts unknown. Lost forever.

  Layne presses his foot on the gas and doesn’t let up. Only one thing on his mind: catching the bastards. He doesn’t care if he has to ram the car and force it into a brick wall to keep it from getting away.

  First, though, he has to catch up to it.

  Daphne and Oleg continue their scratchy assault on his ear until Layne removes his earpiece and tosses it onto the passenger seat. He knows Daphne will lose her voice from screaming at him when this is over. And, he doesn’t care about that at all anymore.

  He squints, trying to look for any oversized black cars out on the road. Layne has no idea where they’re headed. No idea how to catch them. But one thing he can assume is that they will eventually travel to the water. A large headquarters near the river, or maybe an actual pier.

  So, he turns onto Chapman Street and floors it. This late at night there’s little traffic, and nothing for him to worry about in terms of distractions. Pedestrians, sure, but there aren’t many of them at this hour, in this part of town.

  For the first three or four minutes, he does not know where he’s going. Impulsive anger propels him. He keeps seeing Alicia’s body peppered with bullets, how she twisted and fell and died like a dog in the wet alley. Alicia, who was sick of being on this team and had bigger aspirations. NSA, maybe CIA. She could have worked her way up to station chief in a well-run organization like CIA. Layne has
no doubt about that.

  No sign of the traffickers. Layne turns and turns, his tired eyes flicking around the roads and side streets, hunting for anything unusual. It seems whoever he’s tracking has disappeared into the ether.

  But then, he catches a break.

  A black Chevy Suburban idles at a cross street up ahead. Same type of wheels, same tinted windows. This has to be the car.

  Layne slows to get a better look. And, when its tires spin out and the car races away from the intersection, Layne knows for sure.

  He ignores the traffic signals to give pursuit. Daphne rants via the earpiece which is rattling around on his passenger seat like a popcorn kernel in a pan. It rolls every time he jerks the wheel to move closer in pursuit. The fact that he can still hear Daphne yelling means she is in range, which means the team is pursuing him. That’s fine. As long as they don’t get in his way.

  Layne is now directly behind the Chevy Suburban. Every turn it makes, he makes a turn as well. And, just as he thought, they’re headed toward the water.

  He floors it, narrowing the distance.

  But the chase doesn’t last much longer. Something he sees splits Layne’s world into pieces.

  When the water is on his left and a row of tall buildings appears on his right, Layne spots a building out of the corner of his eye. A large structure that looks like it was once an old church, now a dance club, but the dance club has no name. Instead of a name, there’s a sign hanging out in front, above the heads of people waiting in line for their turn to enter. A single symbol marks the identity of the club.

  That symbol is a circle shaped into a ring of fire.

  The exact same symbol Layne found carved into a bone—a human bone—that they uncovered on the first operation of the mission. Inside the cage in the warehouse raid. The same symbol Harry has so far been unable to identify.

  A number of these captives were kept prisoner in that warehouse until their deaths. When one of them died and was reduced to bone and ash, another captive carved that symbol into an available leg bone.

  She must have known she would die, and so she carved a clue as a signal to whoever would find her. A final message. A plea to help the ones who remain.

  A sickening sense of realization washes over Layne as he understands what’s happening. This dance club is the base of operations for the Russian sex slave traffickers in London.

  Layne’s heart ruptures into so many pieces that rage is the only thing fueling him to persevere. So much so, that he doesn’t notice when the BMW he’s driving drifts out of its lane, bounces up on the curb, and crashes into a telephone box.

  The airbag prevents him from flying through the windshield, and his seatbelt keeps him rooted to his spot. His neck snaps back, driving his bulky frame against the seat.

  He blinks a few times as discordant sounds blare all around him. Vision blurry. His head is heavy, like a kettlebell atop his neck.

  Layne sucks in air to clear his thoughts, trying to understand what’s happened. An accident. Is he injured? No. He can still move his hands, his head, and his legs.

  Layne unbuckles his seatbelt and snatches the AR-15 from the seat next to him. He tries to open the car door. It squeals and refuses to budge. Using the rifle stock, he turns his head away from the window. Crack. He bashes it open. Glass splinters and tumbles everywhere. All over his clothes, his arms, his face.

  Layne scrambles out through the open car window, landing on the wet ground. He stands, holding the AR-15 in front of him as glass trickles off him like a waterfall.

  Layne marches toward the dance club.

  44

  Serena killed the engine and parked the snowmobile at the edge of the forest, at a flat spot before the hill rose to a peak. No direct view beyond the crest of the hill up ahead, but her GPS said she was close. She arched her back to stretch and rolled her shoulders a few times. There was no way to know what she would find beyond this hill.

  Serena withdrew a Ruger SR1911 pistol from her jacket pocket and held it pointed at the ground as she crept toward the SMRC campus. Rising, thighs burning, she shuffled along the snowy underbrush to make her way to the hilltop.

  Once she’d crested the hill, she spotted Harry, sitting in the snow behind a boulder. She couldn’t see much of the retreat center from here, but she could clearly make out a collection of corpses, strewn about in piles of red snow. Instinct told her these corpses were arranged to make the scene look staged. This wasn’t only a massacre at the SMRC, it was a setup to frame someone for the killings.

  Harry lifted a hand, and she noted his squinting eyes. No sunglasses. The sun had been out for hours. With all this snow, he would have to be nearly blind by now.

  She crept over to him, keeping her gun low and her body lower since she couldn’t see beyond the tennis court. She crouched next to him. “Can you see?”

  “Not really. My eyes are burning pretty bad. Everything has weird halos around it and blinking feels like I’ve got sand in my eye sockets. Good morning, by the way.”

  “Morning, Harry. Is Layne without eye protection, too?”

  “It’s my fault. He’s over there, in the retreat center, right now. Poking around and doing that thing he always does.”

  “What thing?”

  “You know: being a hero.”

  She leaned around the boulder and took stock of the situation as her eyes adjusted to the brightness of this hilltop area. A half a dozen men in heavy jackets and snow pants, all of them sporting slings with semi-auto rifles, marched back and forth across the campus. They were stacking gear onto a snowcat, which appeared to be running and primed to leave. Sitting at the far end, its nose pointed downhill on what looked like a snow-packed road. They were almost done here.

  “Did you see this happen?” she asked.

  “Some of it. They came yesterday and slaughtered everyone. These guys are actually a different crew.”

  “Interesting,” she said, musing. “Kill the killers and pin it on someone else?”

  “That’s what it looks like. We wanted to stop it, but there were too many of them.”

  Harry’s reddened face seemed full of anguish, and Serena realized this was a moment she was supposed to comfort him. Doing so wasn’t her job, but she reminded herself to be more personable. Daphne always mentioned it in her performance reviews, so maybe this was a good opportunity to practice. “It’s not your fault, Harry.”

  “I know. It just sucks.”

  “What’s his plan?” she asked.

  Harry shrugged. “No idea. Layne is supposed to be over there, making one out of nothing. We have twenty-four hours—or maybe less—to find a boat loaded with human cargo, if we intend to stop it.”

  “How is what he’s doing on campus supposed to help with that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he knows, either. We haven’t had much success on this operation, up to this point. We’re flying mostly by the seats of our pants.”

  “I know how that feels,” she said.

  “I assumed Layne would start shooting by now, but so far, there’s been nothing.”

  Serena squinted at the campus, trying to find him. What was his game? Would he eliminate them and take one hostage to grill him for information? That seemed like a desperation tactic.

  “Whatever he does,” Serena said, “we’re going to recover your clothes and electronics from your room, or cabin, or whatever you called it where you stayed—”

  “Bungalows.”

  “—and then we’re going back to Squamish. Control has an HQ set up for us there. I’ll take you back to the cabin below us, then we’ll get the second snowmobile and bring it back. I think the three of us can fit on two snowmobiles.”

  “And then what?”

  Serena shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Do we wait for him to come back, or do we go now?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” She had to decide, one way or the other.

  And then, she noted a figure slinking
across the campus, sprinting from one bungalow to the next. He was like a cat, scurrying along fences and rooftops in a neighborhood. Then she detected a hint of tattoos poking out of the bottoms of this person’s shirt sleeves. Layne.

  She drew in a breath. A flash of the first moment she ever saw Layne appeared, like sitting in the front row of a movie. Both of them on a train, Layne dejected and jet lagged. Serena unsure if her mission was to kill him or to help him.

  “It’s Layne.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  She cocked her head. He appeared to be going for the snowcat, but he didn’t even have a weapon in his hands. Arms at his sides, fists balled.

  “Does he have a gun?” she asked.

  “Yes, he has a few with him. Is he not armed over there?”

  What the hell was he doing, skulking around with his weapons not drawn?

  While she pondered it, the snowcat engine revved, now with all six of the hostiles on board in the cab up top. As the big treads began to spin, Layne sprinted closer and closer, moving from cover to cover. His gaze was focused on the back of the vehicle.

  “No,” she said as her jaw dropped.

  “What? What’s happening?”

  “He’s crazy. This is not a good idea.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  Before she could open her mouth again to protest, a hunched-over Layne scrambled toward the rear of the snowcat. He latched onto the back of it, and then he climbed underneath. The bulky spy pulled himself up to clear the ground, legs wrapped around a large winch protruding from the back.

  Layne was going to hitch a ride with them, to wherever they were going.

  45

  For two hours, Layne clung to the back of the snowcat. The hulking vehicle crawled down the mountain, twisting and slowly descending the angular snow-packed roads. Around every curve, Layne feared he might be seen. But the soldiers in the glass-windowed cab kept their eyes forward. They paid no attention to what was behind them.