Praise for John Gilstrap

DAMAGE CONTROL

“Powerful and explosive, an unforgettable journey into

the dark side of the human soul. Gilstrap is a master of

action and drama. If you like Vince Flynn and Brad Thor,

you’ll love John Gilstrap.”

—Gayle Lynds

“Rousing ... Readers will anxiously await

the next installment.”

—Publishers Weekly

“It’s easy to see why John Gilstrap is the go-to

guy among thriller writers, when it comes to

weapons, ammunition, and explosives. His

expertise is uncontested.”

—John Ramsey Miller

“If you haven’t treated yourself to one of John Gilstrap’s

Jonathan Grave thrillers, you need not

deprive yourself any longer. Damage Control is

riveting, with enough explosions, death traps, and

intrigue to fill three books.”

—Joe Hartlaub, Book Reporter

“The best page-turning thriller I’ve grabbed in ages.

Gilstrap is one of the very few writers who can

position a set of characters in a situation, ramp up the

tension, and yes, keep it there, all the way through.

There is no place you can put this book down.”

—Beth Kanell, Kingdom Books, Vermont

“A page-turning, near-perfect thriller, with engaging

and believable characters ... unputdownable!

Warning—if you must be up early the next morning,

don’t start the book.”

—Top Mystery Novels

“Takes you full force right away and doesn’t let go

until the very last page . . . has enough full-bore

action to take your breath away, barely giving

you time to inhale. The action is nonstop. Gilstrap

knows his technology and weaponry. Damage

Control will blow you away.”

—Suspense Magazine

THREAT WARNING

“If you are a fan of thriller novels, I hope you’ve been

reading John Gilstrap’s Jonathan Grave series. Threat

Warning is a character-driven work where the vehicle

has four on the floor and horsepower to burn. From

beginning to end, it is dripping with excitement.”

—Joe Hartlaub, Book Reporter

“If you like Vince Flynn–style action, with a

strong, incorruptible hero, this series deserves to

be in your reading diet. Threat Warning reconfirms

Gilstrap as a master of jaw-dropping action and

heart-squeezing suspense.”

—Austin Camacho, The Big Thrill

HOSTAGE ZERO

“Jonathan Grave, my favorite freelance peacemaker,

problem-solver, and tough-guy hero, is back—and in

particularly fine form. Hostage Zero is classic Gilstrap:

the people are utterly real, the action’s foot to the floor,

and the writing’s fluid as a well-oiled machine gun.

A tour de force!”

—Jeffery Deaver

“This addictively readable thriller marries a

breakneck pace to a complex, multilayered plot....

A roller-coaster ride of adrenaline-inducing plot

twists leads to a riveting and highly satisfying

conclusion. Exceptional characterization and an

intricate, flawlessly crafted storyline make this

an absolute must-read for thriller fans.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

NO MERCY

“No Mercy grabs hold of you on page one and

doesn’t let go. Gilstrap’s new series is terrific. It

will leave you breathless. I can’t wait to see what Jonathan

Grave is up to next.”

—Harlan Coben

“The release of a new John Gilstrap novel is always worth

celebrating, because he’s one of the finest thriller writers on

the planet. No Mercy showcases

his work at its finest—taut, action-packed, and

impossible to put down!”

—Tess Gerritsen

“A great hero, a pulse-pounding story—and the launch of a

really exciting series.”

—Joseph Finder

“An entertaining, fast-paced tale of

violence and revenge.”

—Publishers Weekly

“No other writer is better able to combine in a

single novel both rocket-paced suspense and heartfelt looks

at family and the human spirit. And what a

pleasure to meet Jonathan Grave, a hero for our

time . . . and for all time.”

—Jeffery Deaver

AT ALL COSTS

“Riveting . . . combines a great plot and realistic,

likable characters with look-over-your-shoulder

tension. A page-turner.”

—The Kansas City Star

“Gilstrap builds tension . . . until the last page, a

hallmark of great thriller writers. I almost called the

paramedics before I finished At All Costs.”

—Tulsa World

“Gilstrap has ingeniously twisted his simple premise

six ways from Sunday.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Not-to-be-missed.”

—Rocky Mountain News

NATHAN’S RUN

“Gilstrap pushes every thriller button . . . a nail-biting

denouement and strong characters.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Gilstrap has a shot at being the next John

Grisham . . . one of the best books of the year.”

—Rocky Mountain News

“Emotionally charged . . . one of the year’s best.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Brilliantly calculated . . . With the skill of a veteran pulp

master, Gilstrap weaves a yarn that demands to be read in

one sitting.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Like a roller coaster, the story races along on

well-oiled wheels to an undeniably

pulse-pounding conclusion.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

ALSO BY JOHN GILSTRAP

Fiction

High Treason

Damage Control

Threat Warning

Hostage Zero

No Mercy

Scott Free

Even Steven

At All Costs

Nathan’s Run

Nonfiction

Six Minutes to Freedom (with Kurt Muse)

Collaborations

Watchlist: A Serial Thriller

Soft Targets

JOHN GILSTRAP

PINNACLE E-BOOKS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Praise for John Gilstrap

ALSO BY JOHN GILSTRAP

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Teaser chapter

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright Page

For Randy.

Chapter 1

Special Agent Irene Rivers gaped at the man who sat across the conference table from her. From the wall above his head, President Bill Clinton’s official portrait seemed to be enjoying the conversation. “You can’t be serious,” she said.

“I am,” Stephen Greenberg said. “We’re dropping the charges.”

Irene’s heart raced. This couldn’t be happening. “But he’s a murderer,” she said. “He killed a mother and father in their home and kidnapped their two children.”

“Did he?” Greenberg folded his hands and leaned closer. “I’m not sure what version of the Constitution you read, Special Agent Rivers, but the one on my wall presumes innocence until proven guilty. If I can’t prove my case, then by definition, Barney Jennings is innocent.”

Irene felt anger rising in her cheeks. It was Greenberg’s self-righteous smirk more than anything else. She, too, leaned closer. “What’s with the smile, counselor? Whose side are you on?”

Greenberg threw back his head and launched a guffaw that was too big by half. “Oh, is that your strategy? You’re going to mask your own incompetence by impugning my priorities? That’s very smart. Very quick.” He winked. “It’s no wonder that you’re Assistant Director Frankel’s favorite rising star. You’ve got the politics thing down pat.”

She became all too aware of the pistol on her hip, and how easy it would be to snuff this asshole.

“You screwed up, Irene.” Greenberg used his fingers to count off the transgressions. “You didn’t have a warrant to enter Jennings’s house, and you didn’t Mirandize him before putting on the cuffs, and you beat a confession out of him.”

Irene hadn’t done any of those things—she hadn’t even been on the raid—but two of her subordinates had. She didn’t bother to correct the record because she knew where the buck stopped, and her shoulders were plenty broad enough to handle the burden.

Greenberg wasn’t done. “As for the kidnappings, I don’t remember you presenting any napped kids. I’ll stipulate that we haven’t been able to find the Harrelson boys, but in the eyes of the law, there’s a giant step between being missing and being kidnapped.”

“He confessed, Steve.”

“While he was handcuffed and bleeding from the nose. Doesn’t count.”

“They’re still missing,” Irene pressed. “Doesn’t that bother you at all?”

“A lot of things bother me. World hunger bothers me. The fact that the Menendez brothers needed a second trial bothers me. But I try to save myself for the stuff I can control.”

“If we continue to lean on Jennings, we can squeeze him to reveal the location of the kids.”

Greenberg retreated from the table and cocked his head to the side. “Come on, Irene. Let’s be adults here. We all know that those boys are in a shallow grave somewhere. Found or not found, dead is dead.”

Right there, in clear relief, lay the difference between Irene’s brand of justice-seeking and Greenberg’s brand of career protection. “I’m not sure what version of justice you subscribe to, Counselor Greenberg, but in my world, we continue to operate on the assumption that people are alive until they are proven to be dead.”

“That was clever,” Greenberg taunted. “The way you used my sentence structure against me. That was very Harvard-like.”

Her face went hot.

“Come off it, Irene. Be honest. In your years with the Bureau, how many live, thriving victims have you found after, say, forty-eight hours?”

“It happens,” Irene said. “And as long as it’s possible—”

“You’ll battle the Loch Ness Monster and Satan himself to deliver the darlings from their danger. I get that. I even admire that. It’s just a damn shame that your folks broke all the rules.”

“But you could try,” Irene said. “Even if you think you’re looking at a mistrial down the road, if you filed the charges, we could at least make Jennings sweat.”

Greenberg held his hands out to the side, a gesture of helplessness. Of surrender. “Do you know what Judge O’Brian would do to me if I brought this dog to him in open court? He’d eat me alive. He’d chew on the tender parts for a while, and then he’d feed on my guts. I’m not walking into that propeller, Irene. You can call me all the names you want, and stick a hundred pins into your Steve Greenberg doll, but I’m not burning up my reputation on a ridiculous roll of the dice.”

Greenberg checked his watch. “In three hours, maybe less, Barney Jennings will be a free man.” When he looked up and made eye contact, his demeanor softened. “I know this is tough for you, Irene. I wish it could be otherwise.” He stood, pushing his wooden chair away from the table with the back of his knees. “This is going to sound patronizing as hell, but consider it a learning moment. We have rules for a reason, Agent Rivers.”

Irene kept her head down, her eyes focused on a pale water ring that had bleached the dark surface of the cheap table. When she heard the door latch, and she knew she was alone, she considered succumbing to the pressure that built behind her eyes, but she pushed the emotion away.

This was just another case. You win some and you lose some, and if you let cases get inside the wall that was integral to every emergency responder’s survival, you vastly increased the chances of ending your life with a pistol in your mouth. Irene was an expert at building and maintaining protective walls, but something about the Jennings case had cracked her foundations. Maybe it was the volume of blood on the walls, or the forensics that showed the obvious pleasure Jennings had taken from the slow torture of Julian and Samantha Harrelson. If he was willing to do that on-site with adults, she shuddered to think what he would be capable of with the boys, Adam and Clay.

She understood the passion that drove the investigating agents to act spontaneously. They had been tracking this monster for more than two months, and at the time they’d crashed the door without a warrant, they’d had reason to believe that the Harrelson boys were still inside Jennings’s squalid little house. One fewer moment of torment had to be worth a lecture from your supervisor, right? Especially when kids were involved.

Except the boys weren’t there. The investigating agents tore through the house, turning the place upside down looking for any evidence that would support what they already knew. They threw Jennings on the floor, ratcheted him into handcuffs tightly enough to draw blood, and they kicked him until he confessed to having watched the Harrelson boys walking to and from school, and of harboring sexual desires for them. Later, after Jennings had been hauled off to jail, investigators found a pair of boy’s underpants that matched the size and the style of name-brand underwear that they’d found in the Harrelson home. The underpants had been crammed into a drawer in Jennings’s bedroom that also held a variety of sadomasochistic sex toys.

Yet that haul of evidence had been deemed by the office of the United States attorney to be fruit from the poisonous tree, and inadmissible in court. All because two well-meaning, hardworking public servants had failed to knock on a murderer’s door.

Irene felt numb as she walked out of the federal courthouse onto Washington Street in Alexandria, Virginia, on as beautiful a day as the Washington, D.C., suburb could conjure in early April. The bright sun took the edge off the chilly air, and as she walked down the sidewalk to rescue her car from the lot, she cast an impatient glance at the towering statue of the Confederate soldier that blocked the intersection with Prince Street, the soldier’s back perpetually turned on the north. “You freaking lost,” she mumbled under her breath. “Get over it.”

Irene’s anguish wouldn’t go away. Her boss made sure of that.

Barney Jennings held a press conference on the day he was released of all charges, lambasting the FBI for what he called their “overreach” in persecuting the innocent instead of prosecuting the guilty.

Later that same day, Irene’s boss, Peter Frankel, publicly chastised her and her staff for unprofessional behavior, and Judge O’Brian sent a letter for her jacket that expressed his personal displeasure over the way she’d conducted herself in the Jennings investigation. “Justice and bullying are not the same things,” he wrote. “They are not in the same spectrum. As an officer of this court, your first responsibility—your primary responsibility—must always be to protect the rights of the innocent.”

As if she needed a lecture on justice.

And then there was the final humiliation. She summoned the two agents involved—Tony Mayo and Amanda Whitney—into her office to deliver the verdict from the Office of Professional Responsibility, the FBI’s version of the police department’s Internal Affairs Division.

Though they were both in their mid-thirties, they looked somehow much younger as they walked in step into the nondescript bland space that doubled for Irene’s office. They stood at attention, their hands at their sides, by all measures prepared to take their medicine.

“Have a seat,” Irene said.

They hesitated.

“Both of you.” She used the tone that people wisely interpreted as leaving no room for negotiation.

They sat. In unison.

Irene wanted to tell them to relax, that this really was just a bit of posturing that would quickly blow over, but this was no time to lie. “It’s bad,” she said.

At the sound of Irene’s words, color drained from around Amanda’s mouth, even as Tony sat a little taller. “How bad?” Tony asked. His Latin heritage clearly reflected in his coloring, Tony Mayo had a chiseled, athletic look about him. If he hadn’t chosen the FBI, he could have chosen to model clothes.

Irene sighed. She’d learned that the most merciful way to deliver awful news was to shrug away all the weasel words and drill straight between the eyes. “On the one-to-ten scale of badness, it’s about an eleven,” she said. “The letters going in your file are crippling. They hold you accountable for Barney Jennings being re-inflicted onto the American public.”

Amanda said, “Maybe if Assistant Director Frankel hadn’t made such a big deal out of the arrest—”

“You screwed up,” Irene said, cutting her off. “That’s the bottom line here. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that your role was anything short of causal.”

Tony’s face reddened. “You’re suggesting that we should have just ignored the potential suffering that was going on behind that door?”

Irene felt her cheek twitch. It was her anger tell. One of the major traits that separated new agents from veterans was the ability to embrace one’s role in a Golf Foxtrot—a goat fuck. “You made a call,” she said. “In a perfect world, that would be admirable simply on the basis of the courage it took. Unfortunately, we live in the world created by his royal eminence J. Edgar Hoover, and the anticipation is that everybody will not only have the courage to make the call, but the clairvoyance to know that it is the right one. You missed on the clairvoyance part.”

“With all respect, ma’am, you weren’t there,” Amanda said.

“I didn’t have to be,” Irene snapped. “We have rules, and the rules are based upon the Constitution of the United States. None of us has the authority to circumvent them. That’s why we emphasize them so heavily in the Academy and retrain you on them so frequently. You two broke the rules.”

Mayo screwed his face into a scowl. “Excuse me, Irene, but this is an entirely different tune than the one you sang before you met with the AUSA. Back then, you seemed to understand.”

“Back then I thought I had a valid argument on your behalf,” Irene said. The words tasted like acid. “It turns out that I did not.”

“So we’re your sacrifice to the career gods.”

Irene felt something break inside her gut, taking with it her sympathy for her team. She felt her face redden and she deliberately fought the urge to yell. Rather, she lowered her voice to barely a whisper. “It’s time for you to be quiet, Agent Mayo,” she said.

Mayo’s eyes flashed fear at the sound of her voice. He looked like he might want to apologize, but he wisely chose not to.

“A career in the FBI is a lot like a poker game,” Irene said. “The safest move is to walk away and watch a movie instead. Once you give in to the temptation, though, the game is on and every hand is high stakes. Taking a big chance can bring great reward or it can bring ruin.”

Amanda interrupted with “I don’t think—” but Irene cut her off with a glare. “It’s time for you to shut up, too. Let’s forget about the good intentions and the gut feelings and settle in on the facts of what you did. You entered a targeted home without a warrant, and you beat a suspected felon in order to extract a confession. It’s been some time since I was in the Academy, but wasn’t there a class or two about the evils of invoking Gestapo tactics?”

The reality of their situation hit both of the young agents simultaneously. Mayo’s jaw slackened. “Are we being fired?”

“No,” Irene said. The next part would hurt most. “You’re being encouraged to resign.” She looked away from the tears that rimmed his eyes.

“This is all I’ve wanted to do,” Mayo said. “It’s all I know. It’s all I’ve trained for.”

“And you can stay,” Irene said. “For as long as you can tolerate the worst postings on the planet and a career of scut work.” She looked up at them and sighed as she leaned closer to the edge of her desk, her elbows on her thighs. “You’re fundamentally good agents,” she said. “You’ve developed some solid cases and made some good arrests. No one disputes that. But the Bureau is a political place, and you committed the unpardonable sin: you embarrassed the assistant director. As Peter Frankel himself has said countless times, ‘one oh-shit wipes out a lifetime of atta-boys.’ We can complain that it’s unfair and old school and fundamentally wrong, but that doesn’t change the nature of the Bureau.”

“I’ve got a family,” Amanda said.

“As do we all,” Irene replied. She leaned back and struck a more positive tone. “Come on, people. You’ve both got law degrees from top-ten schools and you’re both young. You can make this a speed bump in your larger career, or you can make it the end. That’s up to you. But the fact remains that with your file burdened with a letter like you received from OPR, your FBI careers are over. You’re the equivalent of a duty officer in the Navy who’s on watch when the ship runs aground. It’s over.”

“What if I choose not to resign?” Amanda asked. “What if I decide that scut work is a fair price to pay for my government retirement?”

“Don’t,” Mayo said, standing. Anger had displaced sadness in his eyes, and Irene was glad to see it. “Don’t give her the satisfaction.” He focused on Irene and leveled his forefinger at her. “I get it. Our careers have to end so that yours can flourish. Throw us on the sacrificial fire and the gods of bureaucracy are satisfied.”

Irene took care to keep her face impassive as she listened to the truth. “You may go now,” she said. “Good luck.”

Chapter 2

Irene sat in a booth near the front window of the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Massaponax, Virginia, just a few hundred yards from the perpetual motion of Interstate 95. She kept one foot tucked under her to make the seat slightly more comfortable, and she bided her time playing the golf tee triangle game that came with the table. The trick was to leapfrog golf tees across the board until only one remained. Thus far, the best she’d managed was three, and that pissed her off. She knew she was better than that.

She was so engrossed in the game that when her guest finally arrived at tableside, she jumped.

“I’m sorry to startle you,” the man said. He wore his perpetual smile, and his mere presence made Irene relax. He also wore a black suit and a clerical collar.

She stood. “Dom,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming.” She’d known Dominic D’Angelo since he was a teenager. Tall and lean with a thick mane of black hair, he’d always been a handsome kid, and now he was a gorgeous man, perhaps rendered more attractive by the fact that his vows made him unapproachable.

He drew her into an embrace. “Irene,” he said. “It’s been a long time. The tone of your message scared me. Are you all right?”

As she pulled away, she gestured to the booth. “Please,” she said. “Have a seat.”

Father Dom slid into the space across from her. “Do I need my stole?” He asked the question with a smile, but she understood that beneath the banter lay a genuine offer.

“No,” she said. “I don’t need to confess so much as I need to vent.”

“First things first,” Dom said. “How are the girls?” In addition to his doctor of divinity, he also carried a PhD in psychology. He knew how to wield both specialties to great effect.

Irene felt herself lighten as she smiled. “They’re both fine,” she said. “Ashley is destined to be the freshman soccer superstar of her high school, and Kelly is twelve going on thirty-five. Ashley is on her way to an invitation-only soccer tournament as we speak, in fact. She’s that good.”

Dom smiled. “I’m impressed. But Good Lord. Fifteen and twelve? How is that possible?”

“Fourteen and twelve,” Irene corrected. “Don’t make it worse than it is.”

“Still. It seems just yesterday that they were toddlers.”

Irene laughed. “Okay, let’s not go there. I can nearly say the same about you. How are you, by the way?”

“I’ve been well,” he said. “I could complain, but no one would listen.”

A moment of silence passed. “You know, I missed you during your Army years. You just fell off the face of the earth.”

Dom shrugged with one shoulder. “I didn’t fall. I wandered. For whatever reason, it was important for me to disappear for a while.” He forced a smile. “If nothing else, Uncle Sam helped me realize what my true calling was.”

“And it wasn’t killing people.”

He held up his hand. “Not fair. Some of the finest people I’ve ever met, I met in the Army. It’s not the cliché.”

Irene blushed. She had no idea why she’d taken a cheap shot. “I know that,” she said. “I meant no offense.”

“And I took none.”

Irene let a moment pass to reset the conversation. “So, you’re in Montross, Virginia, now?”

Before he could answer, a pretty blond thing named Gabby stopped at their table. It turned out that she would be taking care of them this afternoon, and she wanted to know if they were ready to order. It was nearly noon, but Irene was anything but hungry. Still, it would have been rude to take up space without paying at least a little rent. She ordered a cheeseburger and Dom ordered a waffle. Once the waters and coffee were poured, Gabby left them alone again.

“I’m not in Montross,” Dom corrected. “I’m near Montross, in a little place called Fisherman’s Cove. It’s a delightful town filled with wonderful people.”

“And you’re the pastor of a church there?”

“I am. Saint Kate’s—Saint Katherine’s. It’s a wonderful old place that sits on a hill. Just a perfect setting.”

Irene heard her bullshit bell ring. Sometimes she wished that she could stop being a trained investigator. “I mean no offense, Dom, but aren’t you a little young for pastorhood?”

He smiled. “Yes,” he said, “but that’s a story for a different time.” He folded his arms across his chest. “You called me here for a reason.”

And so the pleasantries ended. She held nothing back as she revealed the details of the Barney Jennings debacle, pausing only long enough to accept delivery of their meals, and to assure Gabby that they needed nothing else for now.

Dom listened, the furrows in his brow deepening with every passing detail. When she finished, he looked as if he wanted more. “Is that all of it?” he asked.

“A murderer went free, Father. And two fine careers were ruined in the process. Isn’t that enough?”

Dom cocked his head and offered a smile. “I’m always on your side, Irene,” he said. “Never think for a moment that I’m not.”

“But?” She didn’t get why he wasn’t frothing with ire over her circumstance.

“No but,” he said. “You made a mistake. It comes with that human package you wear. We all do that from time to time. You need to cut yourself a break.”

Irene’s ears went hot. “A man and a woman are dead, Father. Two boys are missing. For all I know, they’re dead, too. Worse, for all I know, they’re in someone’s basement being tortured every day. I allowed that to happen.”

Dom had cut his waffle into precise quadrants, which he reduced to triangles before detaching a corner and slipping it into his mouth without syrup. He took his time chewing while Irene positively vibrated in her seat awaiting his answer.

He took a sip of coffee and said, “You don’t impress me as a whiner. Why are you whining?”

Anger bloomed. “Excuse me?”

“You’re whining. You’re showing righteous indignation. Throwing yourself a pity party. If I understand the details correctly, if the ball hadn’t been fumbled, we would know for a certainty that this Barney Jennings fellow had killed people. Now you only suspect that—or maybe you know it in your heart. Whatever. Explain to me where you could have prevented the deaths or the kidnappings in the first place.”

“I don’t understand your point.”

“Sure you do. You’re beating yourself up as if you’d somehow pulled the trigger on the crime itself. You didn’t. The Jennings guy did. Now there’s been a screw-up and he’s free, but that’s where your fault—if that’s even the right word—begins and ends. There is no blood on your hands, Irene.”

How could he not understand something so obvious? “But Dom, it’s my job to keep bad guys off the street. If he moves on from this and hurts someone else—”

“Then you’ll be there to catch him. Or you won’t. But that isn’t what we were talking about. Don’t change the discussion in midstream.”

Irene felt a stab of anger. This wasn’t how the conversation was supposed to go. She was supposed to vent and Dom was supposed to understand.

Dom’s expression softened. “I sense I’m making it worse,” he said. “I don’t mean to sound harsh. In fact, I mean to sound the opposite of harsh. I just don’t want you beating yourself up more than is reasonable.”

“What do I do with the anger.”

Through a mouthful of waffle, Dom said, “I imagine a couple of extra hours on the shooting range might help.”

“They don’t let you put up pictures of suspects and shoot at them.”

“But only you and God will know what’s in your heart while you’re wasting a silhouette.” They shared a laugh. “Isn’t there some place in FBI Land where you can talk through these things with people who have been there?”

“Absolutely,” Irene said. “And to go there is to mark the first day of the end of your career. The spirit of J. Edgar Hoover still wanders the halls. Any and all weaknesses are seen as deal breakers.”

“Precisely the attitude that keeps psychologists in business,” Dom said.

“But you don’t cost anything,” Irene said with a smile.

“I see. I am merely value added for your membership in the Catholic Church.”

Irene reached across the table and grasped his hand. “Do me a favor, Father. Never use the word merely in any sentence that refers to you. You’re a very special man.”

He blushed, considered saying something, then put another wad of waffle into his mouth.

“What you’re telling me is that I should put on my big-girl panties and get over it,” Irene said.

“Do yourself a favor,” Dom said, grinning. “Never use the word panties in a conversation with a priest. It makes us uncomfortable.”

Irene had burned a few hours of personal time for her meeting with Dom, and rather than driving all the way back into the District to return to work for a couple of hours, she headed home to King’s Park, a bastion of suburbia in Fairfax County, just outside the Beltway. Constructed in the early sixties, the homes here were built like fortresses on quarter-acre parcels of land. Her model—a Duchess located on Thames Street—was the only home she’d ever seen where the sole access to the backyard was to go upstairs. That’s what happens when you literally build a house into the side of a hill.

She and the girls had moved there after the divorce, and over the intervening three years, Irene had come to think of the place as a real home. Getting rid of the avocado appliances had helped.

Upon entering through the front door, Irene dropped her purse on the bench that sat in the foyer and crossed over to the kitchen, where she unholstered her SIG Sauer P228 pistol and deposited it into the cupboard over the refrigerator. Back when the kids were little, she’d taken the extra precaution of locking the weapon in a box, but now that they were older and accomplished shooters themselves, that no longer made sense.

With her weapon put away, she removed a Diet Coke from the fridge, popped the top, and wandered over to the answering machine on the counter next to the stove. The flashing light told her that she’d missed five phone calls today. Actually, if recent past was precedent, Ashley had missed four phone calls and Irene had missed one. Now that her naturally athletic daughter had sprouted breasts, the boys had begun to swarm.

Irene pressed the replay button. “Um, hi, Mrs. Rivers. This is Bruce Parker, coach of the War Hawks. Ashley was supposed to report to the gym by eight-thirty, but now it’s eight forty-five, and I was wondering if there was a problem. Give me a call, please, one way or another. If she’s not going to be able to make the tournament, I’m going to have to make arrangements very quickly.” He then gave a call-back number.

Irene’s stomach knotted. Ashley had been looking forward to this soccer tournament for weeks. It was all she could talk about this morning as she left the house to walk to the school bus stop. How on earth would she—

The machine moved on to its second message. Same voice as before. “Mrs. Rivers, Bruce Parker again. It’s nine-fifteen, and we need to get on the road. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am in Ashley—and, frankly, in you—for not having the courtesy of informing the team that she had other plans.” Then a click as the call terminated.

Irene looked at the clock on the wall. It was three o’clock, straight up. What the hell was going on? Where was Ashley? For that matter, where was Kelly? She should have been home by now, too. A talker by nature, Kelly prattled constantly about her adolescent schedules and concerns, but as Irene scoured her brain for any snippet of conversation they might have had that would explain her absence, she came up with nothing.

The third message: “Hello, Mrs. Rivers. This is Roberta Ingersoll at Lake Braddock High School. Ashley didn’t make it into school today, and I’m calling to make sure that you are aware, and to ask you to verify that her absence is excused. Please call me at . . .”

Irene made no note of the number. Clearly, something was wrong. Her children were missing. No, she chided herself. There has to be some reasonable—

Next message. “Um, yo, Mrs. Rivers. This is Charlie Binks and I was wondering if Ashley could call me when she gets home—”

Irene pushed the dump button. She had no idea who Charlie Binks was, but he was clearly young, and he was one of the honey-sniffing bees.

Message five. “Hello, Irene,” a voice said. “When you get a chance, check under the welcome mat outside your front door. This should be fun.” Click.

The caller’s voice had a gravelly quality that made Irene wonder if the voice was being faked. The tone was all menace. Taken in context with the rest, Irene’s heart rate tripled. Her family was under attack. Moving quickly, her hands trembling, she pulled her firearm back out of the cupboard and slid it back into her holster, high on her right hip. Normally, she went to considerable lengths to hide the weapon from sight, but now she didn’t care. In fact, she wanted the neighbors to be fully aware that she was willing and able to gun down anyone who got in her way.

Irene forced herself to slow down as she approached the front door. Frightened and jumpy, she recognized this as the time when she would be most likely to make a bad judgment. Panic was the number-one killer among law enforcement personnel. Adrenaline rushed, hands shook, and the first casualty was situational awareness. She’d seen it happen countless times, both in the heat of a firefight, and in the evidence that followed such firefights.

She walked to the front door and pulled it open, standing there for a moment, scanning for anything out of the ordinary. More specifically, for anyone out of the ordinary. The world seemed stable. Glancing at the stoop, she saw where the mat lay askew. Welcome to the Rivers’s. The girls had bought her that for her birthday last year and she remembered suppressing the urge to correct the spelling of the possessive.

Never taking her eyes away from the horizon for more than a few seconds at a time, Irene squatted low and lifted the corner of the mat with her left hand. The right stayed free for the SIG, just in case.

She thought the envelope was small for its color. Generally, manila envelopes were big things—eight and a half by eleven, minimum, designed to mail documents flat—but this one was actually smaller than a white envelope you’d use for the mail. Even as she lifted it, she knew that she was breaking the most basic rules of evidence gathering. She was contaminating what might otherwise be a trove of trace, but to the depths of her soul, she didn’t care. Ashley and Kelly were missing. The weight of that word, and all that it implied, made her knees sag.

The envelope bore no markings on the outside. What was she expecting, a return address? Stupid criminals had done stupider things. As she pinched open the butterfly clip at the top of the back side of the envelope, she made note of the fact that the glue on the flap hadn’t been moistened. That meant that the guy who was responsible—Jennings—had been smart enough not to leave DNA evidence. And if he’d been smart enough to do that, then he’d no doubt been smart enough to wear gloves and some kind of outer garment that would keep fibers and hair from settling onto whatever the envelope brought.

She told herself that that meant there was no harm in ignoring the evidentiary procedures. As she pulled the contents out, she noted the details. White printer paper, folded in half, words in, not out. That told her that Jennings had a gift for drama. Hide the reveal until the last possible moment.

Her mind screamed for her to stop and call the CSU—crime scene unit. This document needed to be processed. It needed to be evaluated for all manner of trace evidence. The ink on the paper could be traced, and the grammar could be evaluated for ethnic patterns. All of it could be pristine only once, and here she was ruining that moment.

Ashley and Kelly are missing.

Opening the paper, she noted that the words were printed in a standard typeface—she thought it was called Times New Roman, but maybe not. She did see, however, that the print was fancy, not the work of the upscale dot matrix printer that she’d paid a fortune for. Did that mean that Jennings was rich, or did it mean merely that he had access to a good printer, one of those ink jet jobs that she’d seen in the director’s office?

Her hands shook.

I have them. If you contact your colleagues, I will know and I will kill them. That would be such a sad end for two such beautiful little girls. As long as you suffer in the knowledge that they are gone, they needn’t suffer at all. One day, if you behave, I’ll give them back to you. If you talk to the police, you’ll get them back one part at a time. If you just play the game, you’ll get them back whole, older, wiser, and very street smart.

Irene’s vision blurred as she read the words. The air became too thick to breathe. Honest to God, if this monster so much as touched her girls—

What? What would she do? What could she do? He’d already touched them, for Christ’s sake. How else would he have shoved them into a car, or done whatever he’d done to snatch them off the street? Her anger melded with her fear, and the resultant stew of emotion was a toxic one. Irene felt overwhelmed by the need to kill someone. To kill Barney Jennings. Could it be that simple?

Her stomach seized as she thought about that smirk in his press conference. It was his way—well established via the Harrelson boys—to hide very well those he took. If Irene killed Jennings, then she would never know where her girls were.

Her head ached as thousands of thoughts flooded her brain simultaneously, as if they were trying to expand the volume of her skull. Maybe this is what panic felt like. Panic: the emotion that everyone promised was the big killer in an emergency. It occurred to her in a bitter haze just how easy it was to think of panic as a weakness when it’s considered in the third person, yet it was so organic in the first.

A monster had taken her children. She saw their innocent faces, smiling under their helmets of blond hair, and then she saw those angelic faces morphing into masks of terror. Of pain. She saw them wondering when their mother was going to come and rescue them.

The only rational course was for her to call her office and get the Bureau involved. This was precisely the kind of case that would galvanize every agent in the country to avenge the harm that had befallen one of their own.

I will know and I will kill them.

The words terrified her. Instinctively, intuitively, she knew that the kidnapper was bluffing—how could he possibly know what was going on inside of the closed sphere that defined the law enforcement community?—but Jennings had shown a disturbing level of cunning and cleverness. Would he state something so dogmatically if it were not true? She sensed not.

Irene tried to corral her thoughts, bring order to the blooming panic. It was obvious what she should do, what she would tell the person on the other end of a phone call to do. But this was real. This was first person, and deep in her soul, she knew that Jennings—the author of the note—was telling the truth.

So, what was she supposed to do with that? Was she supposed to just trust this asshole with the lives of her daughters? That was as nonstarting as any nonstarter could be. Was she supposed to pretend that none of this had happened, and pray that it would come to a happy ending? Surely Jennings knew that that would never happen.

Maybe he was expecting her to go to the police, and as soon as she did, he would use that as an excuse to kill Ashley and Kelly. She had to assume that was the case.

Irene stepped back into the foyer and pushed the door closed. When she was confident that she was invisible to the outside world, she sat down on a patch of tile floor and read the note again. And again. It was all too much to process. What was that monster—?

No. She couldn’t go there. That was a trip from which there could be no happy return. Once you started to imagine the harm that could befall a loved one, no scenario but the worst could possibly resonate.

She needed to remain positive. Or, if not positive, then optimistic. Not pessimistic. There was a way to solve this.

But how?

Irene needed help, but all of the standard avenues for assistance—the ones who carried badges and guns—were out of the question, at least for the time being.

I will know and I will kill them.

Jesus.

Jesus. Exactly. In that moment, in that single rush of clarity, she knew exactly what she needed to do.

Chapter 3

It turned out that driving to Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia, was a hell of a lot easier than finding it on the map. Irene’s AAA map of the Commonwealth showed it as a tiny speck on the banks of the Potomac River, but to get reliable driving directions, she had to buy an ADC map from a 7-Eleven in Colonial Beach.

The ninety-minute drive helped to soothe her nerves—to prioritize her options—and as she finally drove down Church Street on her way toward the water, she was struck by just how charming a place it was. By all appearances, it was a fishing village, but unlike most such villages in the final decade of the twentieth century, this one still appeared to thrive. On the corner where you would expect to see a big-name chain drugstore, she noted Hamilton Pharmacy, and just from the looks of the place, she knew there had to be a soda fountain in the back corner.

The streets weren’t crowded, exactly, at this hour of a weekday afternoon, but they weren’t empty, either. In fact, as she drove past the Cricket Shop, a throwback haberdasher, she witnessed a handshake between a customer and the man she presumed to be the proprietor as the former left with a plastic bag draped over a hanger. From the size and shape, Irene assumed it was a suit, and from the look of satisfaction on the customer’s face, she assumed that it was a nice one.

Everyone seemed so damned contented. It was like entering a world that had somehow insulated itself from the cruelties that savaged the rest of the planet, and she at once admired and pitied them. It was the burden of the life she’d chosen to know the terrible facts that the rest of the world was shielded from. She was among the few who anguished so that the rest of the population could sleep soundly.

I will know and I will kill them.

Irene was not well trained in the science of avoiding detection or shaking trackers, but she’d been watching, and as far as she knew, she hadn’t been followed. And even if she had, surely even the most monstrous of monsters would not harm her for seeking counsel from her priest. That’s what she told herself, anyway.

Still two or three blocks from the river, she passed an enormous mansion on the left. Easily the largest residence she’d seen, it seemed to be nearly the same size of the church that loomed farther down the hill—Saint Katherine’s Catholic Church. Between the two structures sat a two-story colonial that she pegged as late-eighties construction. It was served by a two-hundred-foot driveway, which ended with a small white-on-black metal sign that read, RECTORY.

Irene swung the turn and drove toward the house. By the time she got to the space in front of the garage, Father Dom was already standing on the front stoop, waiting. The clerical suit was gone, replaced by blue jeans and a Washington Redskins T-shirt. He approached the car as she opened her door, and was there at the opening as she started to climb out.

“Are you okay, Irene?” he asked. “You sounded so frantic on the telephone.” He extended his arms wide for an embrace, which she accepted.

When her lips were very close to his ear, Irene whispered, “Someone has kidnapped my girls.”

She felt his shoulders stiffen. He pushed her out to arm’s length. “Oh, my heavens, Irene. What are—?”

“Can we go inside, Dom? I don’t want to talk about this out here. I don’t want anyone to see.”

“See what?”

“Please, Father. Can’t we—?”

“Of course, of course. Please come this way.”

He led the way up the brick walkway to the house’s front door and opened it, gesturing for Irene to cross the threshold first.

Inside, the rectory looked like, well, a home. Why did that surprise her so? Moreover, it looked like a home that could have been in any suburb of any city in the country. In fact, it didn’t look all that much different from her own home. The dining room lay on the left of the center hall, the living room to the right. She was struck by just how homey the place felt. A television on the far side of the living room showed a golf game in progress, and an even younger priest than Dom sitting on the sofa, thoroughly engaged.

“Father Tim?” Dom said, breaking the reverie.

The sound of Dom’s voice seemed to startle the other priest, and his head whipped around. “Yes?”

“Can you excuse us, please? I need to speak—”

Father Tim shot to his feet. “Yes, yes,” he said. He seemed self-conscious of the open beer on the end table. As he scooped it up, he made a valiant but ineffective effort to hide it. “I’ll get right out of your way.” He made no attempt to introduce himself to Irene, nor to seek her introduction.

Irene suppressed a laugh as the young man rushed past and hurried toward the stairs to the upper level.

“He’s very new,” Dom explained, answering her question before she could ask it. “He gets a little twitchy at times.”

Dom gestured to the chair that Father Tim had just vacated. “Please,” he said, “have a seat. Start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

“Why are you so sure that this is the work of Jennings?” Dom asked when she was done.

“How could it be anyone else?”

Dom cocked his head and gave a little smirk. “You know that another question is never an answer, right?”

Irene conceded the point by sagging her shoulders. “I know it because I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Dom smiled.

“Am I missing a joke?” she asked.

“Not at all. It’s just that a friend of mine is fond of saying the same thing. There’s no one else who would fit the profile of someone who might threaten you through your children?”

Irene felt her jaw drop. What the hell kind of question was that? They were children.

Dom held up his hands. “I mean no offense. But you’ve been with the FBI for what? Ten years? Twelve?”

“A little over thirteen.”

“Which is the same as a little under fourteen,” Dom said. “My point is that that you’ve had time to make a lot of arrests and accumulate a lot of enemies. Yet you seem so sure that your enemy in this case is Barney Jennings.”

Irene saw his point. “There are . . . similarities,” she said. “The Harrelson boys disappeared without a trace. I mean, literally without a trace. We don’t begin to know where to start looking for them.”

“And you determined that after a full investigation that was run by your entire team.”

“Yet Jennings stayed ahead of us. Not far ahead, mind you, but just a step or two.”

Dom scowled. “Are you suggesting inside information?”

Irene steeled herself with a deep breath. She didn’t want to say what was coming next. “Truthfully, I don’t know what I think.”

“But you know what you suspect.”

“Yes, I do. I’d had hints of it other times during the investigation—that sense that Jennings was either the luckiest or smartest son of a bitch on the planet—” She caught herself cussing and blushed. “Sorry.”

“Oh, that that were the worst that I heard on an average day, even coming from the school.” He waited a beat. “You were about to tell me whether you think there’s some kind of inside-the-FBI involvement.”

“I worry that there is,” Irene said.

“And because of that, you fear that if you involve the police, Jennings will find out and do something to the girls.”

Hearing the words from someone else churned her stomach. “Yes.”

“So, what’s your plan?” Dom asked. “What do you need from me?”

Irene felt tears pressing in and she shut her eyes tight. She took a huge breath and held it, hoping that her nerves would settle. After a long time, she said, “I’m not sure I even know, Father. I was hoping that by talking it through I might . . . I don’t know, I might get an idea.”

“Why don’t you pay Mr. Jennings a visit yourself?” Dom asked.

“I have no official probable cause,” she said.

Dom scowled deeply and cocked his head to the side. “You’re putting bureaucracy ahead of your daughters’ welfare?”

Sadness became anger in the space of half a heartbeat. “Dom!”

“Again, no offense,” he said. “But I’m confused. If you know who the perpetrator is, and you know where he lives, and you fear that he’s snatched Ashley and Kelly, I don’t understand why you’re here instead of there.”

“What if I’m wrong?” she asked. “Suspicions are not facts. If I charge into Jennings’s house and demand an answer and he is not the right guy, I can lose everything. The real kidnapper can know what I’ve done, he’ll hurt the girls, and I’ll be boiled in oil by the Bureau.”

Dom looked at her for a long time, and as he did, his gaze narrowed. “Sounds like you need a reliable team,” he said, after a long silence.

“What I need is a suspension of the Constitution and the rules of discovery. I need to find out what has happened to my kids.”

“And it needs to be outside of the law,” Dom said. “May I ask why you came to me?”

The question confused her. “I didn’t come to you for answers, Father. I came to you to talk things through. You’re a friend, a priest, and a shrink. This is the only moment in my life I can think of where I’ve needed all three at exactly the same time.”

She smiled as she said that, but Dom’s face showed no humor. She feared that she’d offended him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“How far are you willing to go?” Dom asked in return.

“Excuse me?”

“How far are you willing to go to be reunited with your daughters?”

“I don’t understand the question.” If it had come from someone else, she might have, but coming from Dom, it was a complete cypher.

“I’m not speaking in riddles,” Dom said. “If it came to a binary choice between not getting Ashley and Kelly back or violating every known rule on the collection of evidence and prosecution of witnesses, which would you take?”

Something tugged in Irene’s spine. She’d never seen Dom like this before. “Are we speaking in hypotheticals here?”

Dom’s expression remained rock hard. “I’m asking you a question. How far are you willing to go to get them back?”

“Whatever it took,” Irene said. “I’d move heaven and earth.”

Dom leaned in closer. “Would you violate the very laws that you swore to uphold?”

“Father, I’m not comfortable—”

“Answer the question,” Dom snapped. “Would you be willing to break the law and risk prison yourself if it meant your children being set free?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Dom, what are you talking—”

“Are you sure?”

“They’re my children, Dom.” Irene didn’t get why he was being so strained, so weird in this discussion. How could he think otherwise? And what was he implying in the first place?

“I need to know, Irene. I have an idea, but I need to know how far you are willing to go.”

Irene scoffed, “What, do you, like, know a hit man or something?”

Dom’s expression remained stone.

The realization hit her like a slap. “Oh, my God, Dom, what are you suggesting?”

He pulled back. “I’m suggesting nothing,” he said. “I’m waiting to hear a request from you.”

“Are you suggesting that you know someone who could . . . address this problem for me?”

Dom reached out and grasped her hand. “Ask me for what you want.”

This was a side of the priest that she had never seen—a side that she was fairly certain no one had ever seen. “I want to find someone who can help me get my daughters back,” Irene said. “And who can punish the son of a bitch who took them.” That last part was important, too.

Dom’s eyes bored into her for a long time, presumably assessing her seriousness. After maybe thirty seconds, he said, “Hang tight for a few minutes. I need to make a phone call.”

Chapter 4

Irene sat alone in the rectory’s living room for the better part of a half hour. She heard Dom on the telephone in the kitchen, and while she couldn’t make out the words, she clearly heard the urgency in his tone. She heard her name mentioned once, and she heard what sounded like a defense of her status as an FBI agent. Finally, she heard the receiver being set into its cradle, and then . . . nothing. She’d expected Dom to return with a status report on whatever he’d been negotiating, but instead, she got only an extended stay in the empty living room.

What was he doing, anyway? The mysterious questions, followed by the long silence, were unnerving. If Dom had a solution, she wanted to hear it. If he didn’t, then she wanted to hear that, too.

When the doorbell finally rang, she jumped. It was the standard ding-dong sound, but it was so out of context that she nearly drew down on it. Apparently, that sound was the cue Dom had been waiting for, because he appeared in a heartbeat, nearly running from the kitchen through the foyer to answer it.

As he pulled the door open, Dom said, “Hi, Dig. Thanks for coming over.”

Dom stepped to the side and ushered in a man who looked like he might have been pulled out of a homeless shelter—a shelter with a very nice weight room. At five-ten, maybe a hundred eighty pounds, the man had wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and arms that threatened to rip the fabric of his T-shirt at the arm holes. Wild brown hair consumed his head and morphed seamlessly into an unkempt beard that seemed to stretch from just under his eyes into the neck of his shirt. His eyes were a shade of blue that she’d never seen before, more befitting a swimming pool than an iris. The eyes were hard, though, and as such matched perfectly the set of his mouth as he stepped into the living room.

“Irene Rivers,” Dom said, “this is my longtime friend Digger. Digger, this is my longtime friend Irene.”

He held out his hand, and Irene grasped it. They felt rough, the hands of a worker. She anticipated a crushing handshake but was pleased when his grasp proved to be gentle. “I’m pleased to meet you,” Irene said.

“Dom tells me you’re with the FBI.”

“That’s correct.”

“And he tells me that your children are in danger. That they’ve been taken.” As he spoke, Digger’s eyes never left hers. From someone else, it would have felt intimidating, but coming from him, it felt as if he were trying to read her mind.

Irene nodded, suddenly not trusting her voice.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Digger said. “Really, I’m very sorry to hear that.”

Dom gestured to the furniture with open arms. “Let’s sit down, shall we?”

Nothing about this felt right to Irene. As she resumed her seat on the sofa, she asked, “Forgive me, Dom, but why is Digger here?”

“I think he might be able to help you,” the priest replied.

“Help me how?”

Dom pointed with his forehead to the new arrival, who’d helped himself to a bentwood rocker.

“Before we get to that,” Digger said, “I need you to tell me that you want this resolved badly enough that you’re willing to break the laws that you’re sworn to protect.”

“What are, you, some kind of hit man?”

His face remained like stone. “Would it matter if I were?”

She turned to Dom. “What is going on here? Do you two rehearse your lines together?”

He shrugged. “Under the circumstances, I think he asks a legitimate question.”

Irene scoured her mind for a way to answer. “I guess it depends on what laws we’re talking about.”

Digger leaned forward far enough to brace his forearms on his knees. “They’re your daughters, Irene. Which laws are out of bounds?”

“Who are you?” Irene demanded. Her bullshit reservoir just filled to overflowing. “And what the hell kind of name is Digger?”

Digger looked across to Dom, who held up a hand in a silent request for patience.

“Irene,” Dom said, “if you just go along with the questions, the rest will play itself out.”

Could she actually say aloud the answer she was contemplating? Dare she confess such a thing out loud, even if it was painfully obvious to everyone in the room? They both waited for her answer.

“As you say,” she said, “they are my daughters. I would do anything for them.”

“Would you kill for them?”

She hated this line of questioning, and she found herself hating Digger for exploring it. Her feelings for Dom were only slightly more charitable.

“Yes,” she said. That was the answer they were waiting for, wasn’t it? Yes, she would kill for her daughters. “If circumstances warranted it.”

Digger’s eye twitched as he half-scowled, half smiled. “A man kidnaps two little girls on the heels of kidnapping two boys after murdering the two boys’ parents. How many more circumstances do you need?”

Irene sensed that she was speaking with a monster. “If you’re asking me if I will commit cold-blooded murder, then the answer is no.” She was surprised when Digger seemed satisfied by her response.

“Good,” he said, “because I am in fact not a hit man, and I don’t care to associate with those who are.” A beat. “Besides, murder wouldn’t serve your purpose. Once somebody’s dead, their intel value drops to zero.”

Irene sensed she was on a roller coaster. Whoever this Digger was, he was expert at keeping people on edge.

He read her confusion and said, “The first part of this mission—the only really important part—is to find your daughters. What are their names?”

“Ashley and Kelly.”

“We need to find Ashley and Kelly. Then we need to liberate them if we can. This Jennings punk is only as valuable as the information he can deliver. Beyond that, he’s a piece of meat that consumes oxygen. I couldn’t care less if he lives or dies.”

“But how are you going to convince him to give you the information?”

“Us, Irene. How are we going to convince him to give us the information?” Digger smiled and winked. “That’s when we begin to break those laws.”

Irene gaped, waiting for this to make sense.

Digger extended his hand. “My real name is Jonathan,” he said. “Jonathan Grave. I’m in the Army, attached to a unit that specializes in hostage rescues.”

If that was supposed to clear things up, it missed the mark by a long shot. “You’re suggesting turning this into a military operation? You look awfully young to have stars on your shoulders.”

Jonathan smiled. He seemed to be enjoying the confusion. “Nope, no stars. No eagles, oak leaves or bars, either. Just a lot of stripes. And no, I’m not proposing to turn this into a military operation. In fact, I’m proposing to turn this into a freelance operation. I figure that between our mutual skill sets, we could pull off something impressive.”

“What about posse comitatus?” The laws were very explicit that the United States military was forbidden to conduct combat operations on American soil.

“You’re really having a hard time wrapping your mind around this breaking-the-law thing, aren’t you?”

Yes, she was. “I guess I’m just not seeing the larger plan.”

“Think of it as an HRT op without the warrants and due process. Exactly what we do all the time overseas.”

Irene recognized HRT as the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. “Who’s we?”

Jonathan shrugged. “My colleagues and I. Your colleagues, too.”

Irene’s response to that was near reflexive. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then you haven’t been paying attention. I even got to play with some of your folks down in Colombia. Ringing bells yet?”

With that statement, Irene understood much more. While she had no official knowledge of the drug war activities in Colombia, news outlets had been buzzing about it for weeks, and she’d heard her share of rumors in the halls of the Hoover Building. If she guessed right, this Jonathan Grave fellow was a part of one of the most elite and secret military units in the world.

“The plan,” he continued, “is as simple as it gets. We pay your friend Jennings a visit and we scare the living shit out of him. He tells us what we want to know, or we’ll make his situation extraordinarily uncomfortable.”

Irene felt a rush of dread. “You’re talking about torture.”

“No,” Jonathan said. “I’m talking about persuasion.”

“How is that different from torture?”

He shrugged with one shoulder. “Torture is what the bad guys do.”

“A rose by a different name, then.”

He inhaled deeply, as if to bolster lagging patience. “Look, this guy is not a soldier, okay? He’s not going to be inclined to take one for the team. He’s a coward who preys on children. The only strength he has is that which he is granted through the legal system that you seem so hesitant to rattle. Once he knows that those avenues are no longer available to him, he’ll sing long and loud. My experience with guys like him is that you never actually have to hurt them. You just have to make them think you will.”

It all sounded so reasonable and rational when it was presented in such calm tones. All she had to do was violate every oath she’d ever sworn, and turn her back on a lifetime of principles.

Jonathan continued with his sales pitch. “You want this to be more complicated than it is,” he said. “If your children were taken across the border to Mexico or across the sea to some East African shithole, this is exactly the mission I would be dispatched to carry out with the full authority of the United States government. They’re your daughters. It’s your call.”

“No torture,” Irene said. Was it possible she was on the brink of agreeing to this madness?

“No,” Jonathan snapped. “No rules up front. We’ll do what is necessary to accomplish the mission. I’m not going to make a promise that I’m not one-hundred-percent sure I can keep. I’ll ask the same thing of you. We play with a full deck or we don’t play at all.”

Irene found herself breathing too deeply as she sifted through all that was being asked, and through the resulting ramifications. She looked to Dom, whose handsome face was set in a blank mask.

“If I do this, Dom, and I seek forgiveness, could it possibly come?”

Dom’s eyes turned kind. “I can grant absolution,” he said, “but it’s up to the Big Boss to decide on forgiveness.”

Something dissolved inside of Irene.

“I’ll step out of bounds, though,” Dom continued. “I cannot believe that the Good Lord would prefer to watch a scumbag game the system rather than have two lovely young ladies reunited with their mother.”

Tears welled, blurring her view as she switched her gaze to Jonathan. “Let’s do it,” she said.

Chapter 5

Irene had never seen such a mansion. Situated next door to the rectory, it was the massive structure she’d noticed on the way into town.

Jonathan ushered her through the front door and she was nearly overwhelmed by the opulence of the place. Everything from the sprawling oriental carpets to the mahogany stair rails were of the highest quality. The chandelier in the towering thirty-foot foyer glistened with millions of crystal baubles. She figured it weighed more than her car.

“So you say you’re an enlisted man in the Army,” she commented as she took it all in.

“Actually, I’m a noncommissioned officer. An E-8. First sergeant.”

“They must pay you very well.”

“I’m very good at what I do.” He led the way down the hall to a room on the right. This had to be called the library, just because of the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books. He helped himself to a comfortable forest-green leather chair and, with a sweeping motion of his upturned palm, he invited Irene to sit wherever she liked. She selected a silk-fabric love seat directly across from the fireplace.

“My real home is on post at Fort Bragg,” Jonathan went on. “This is just the place where I grew up.”

Irene felt her eyebrows scale her forehead. Richie Rich has nothing on this guy.

“Jonny, is that you?” a voice called from somewhere outside of the room.

Jonathan actually blushed. “Yes, Mama, it’s me.”

He lives with his mother? That didn’t fit Irene’s view of this guy at all.

Jonathan stood and walked to the door, where he met a round black woman as she crossed the jamb. Her eyes widened as she noticed Irene. “I didn’t know you had company,” she said in a Southern drawl as smooth as honey. Her words dripped disapproval.

“Mama, it’s not what you think,” he said.

Irene tried to help out, rising from her seat and offering her hand in greeting. “I’m Irene Rivers,” she said. “Special agent with the FBI.”

The woman hesitated before accepting the gesture of kindness. “I’m Mama,” she said. “Mama Alexander, if you’d prefer.”

Irene hesitated, not sure if she understood.

“Mama is a mainstay here in Fisherman’s Cove,” Jonathan explained. “Lived here her whole life. Tell anyone in town that Mama is your friend, and every door will open for you.”

Irene harbored no doubt that the converse of that statement was equally true. “A genuine pleasure to meet you,” she said.

“I’m helping Irene out with a problem she’s having,” Jonathan explained. To Irene’s ear, he sounded oddly like a teenager covering his tracks.

“Uh-huh,” Mama said. “Well, I’m pleased to meet you, too.” She turned her gaze back to Jonathan. “Will you be wanting dinner tonight?”

“Don’t go to any trouble,” Jonathan said.

“And should I set an extra place at the table?” Her glare heated the room another twenty degrees.

“Not for me,” Irene said. “I won’t be staying. Thank you though.”

Mama’s face remained locked in a scowl. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Well, drive carefully on your way home.” To Jonathan: “You remember to be a gentleman, young man.” As she walked away, Jonathan closed the door behind her.

Returning to his chair, the redness in Jonathan’s cheeks hadn’t dimmed completely. “Mama was our housekeeper when I was growing up. My mom died when I was little, so Mama pretty much raised me.” He gestured with open arms. “This is her house now.”

Whoa, that’s not what Irene had been expecting. “Excuse me?”

Jonathan dipped his head as he clarified. “Well, it actually belongs to St. Kate’s now, but on the condition that Mama and her daughter get to live here in perpetuity.”

“What does a church want with a mansion?” Irene asked.

“They’re going to turn it into a school,” Jonathan explained, “exclusively for the children of incarcerated parents. We’re going to call it Resurrection House. Care to guess who the chief psychologist is going to be?”

“Dom.” Just from the way he’d stated the question there could only be one answer.

“Bingo.” Jonathan cleared his throat and crossed his legs. “To the business at hand,” he said, changing the subject. “I think we need to rock Jennings’s world. Knock him completely off balance. That will give us the edge when it comes time to questioning him.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” Irene said. In fact, she had stopped understanding the narrative of her life about thirty minutes ago.

“You will,” he said. “You must be hungry. When was the last time you ate?”

Good Lord, this guy could whipsaw a conversation. She started to answer, but stopped when she realized the truth of it. “I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

Jonathan stood. “Go get some food,” he said. “Go to the end of the walk, turn left and walk to the bottom of the hill, to the river. You’ll see Jimmy’s Tavern. They’ve got better food than you think they will, and an excellent selection of single malts. Go with the Tavern Burger. Enough protein in that to keep you going for the rest of the day.”

“I shouldn’t,” Irene said. “If I’m going to be a part of this, I want to be part of the planning.”

“And you will be,” Jonathan said. “I promise. I just want to put together a little show-and-tell is all. Give me an hour. Even forty-five minutes will do.”

This wasn’t right. At so many levels, it wasn’t right. “I don’t want to leave you with all the legwork. I can do—”

Jonathan cut her off. “Irene. I don’t want you to see the details of what’s coming next. When you see those details, you’ll understand exactly why I don’t want you to see where they came from.”

There it was. She stood. “Okay, then. See you in an hour.”

As Jonathan walked her to the door, she was again taken by the sheer majesty of the place. Where did anybody get this much money? And once born into this much money, who in their right mind would walk away from it in favor of a fifty-thousand-dollar paycheck from Uncle Sam?

“I’m sorry for the mysteriosity,” Jonathan said as he opened the door. A flash in his eyes told her that the made-up word was a joke.

“I understand,” Irene said. “Trust is a journey. We’re just on the first step.” And of the two of us, I’m the only one who’s fully exposed, she didn’t say.

“Tell Jimmy that Digger sent you,” Jonathan said. “That’ll either get you a few dollars off the bill or get you thrown through the window.” Again, his eyes sold the humor. In a rugged nonglamorous way, Jonathan Digger Grave may well have been the most handsome man she’d ever met. Good Lord, those eyes!

As she navigated Jonathan’s directions to the sidewalk and then down the hill toward the Potomac River, Irene marveled at the charm of Fisherman’s Cove—a place she’d never heard of before Dom had announced that he would be moving there. It appeared that the residential part of town ended at the church, and that everything downhill from there—she had no idea what that compass direction would be, thanks to the complex geography of the Northern Neck—was part of the business district.

At a time when small-town America was heaving its last sighs, this little burg still teemed with life. More important, it apparently teemed with cash flow. Where painted clapboards faced the sun, she saw none of the cancerous peeling that she’d become so accustomed to. As she closed in on the bottom of the hill and the river that lay beyond, she was even more amazed to see that this was still an active commercial fishing village. Hardworking hard men swarmed to offload the day’s catch.

Jimmy’s Tavern sat exactly where Jonathan had suggested it would, at the bottom of the hill, and just a tad to the right. As she crossed the street, her eye was drawn to an old-school three-story firehouse that appeared to be in the throngs of being demolished. It registered with her only because her uncle on her father’s side had been a volunteer firefighter.

The much-touted Tavern Burger turned out to be a lethal assortment of butter, fat, and sodium, so Irene opted for the Cobb salad instead. She asked for dressing on the side, but it came pre-slathered anyway, presenting its own lethal combination of fat and sodium. The butter might well have been there, too, but if it was, she couldn’t put her finger on it.

The hour crawled by like three. When Irene returned to the mansion and rang the bell, the door opened within seconds. Mama Alexander stood in the opening with a look on her face that was significantly less harsh than the one from earlier, but still three clicks shy of welcoming. “Come in, Irene,” she said.

“Hello, Mama.”

“Jonny is waiting for you in the library, where he was the last time.” She gestured down the hall with an open palm.

Irene stepped inside. “Thank you.”

“You be careful now,” Mama said. “Don’t you go gettin’ him hurt, you understand?”

The structure of the comment rattled Irene. Did Mama assume that Irene was somehow in charge? Is that what Digger told her? If so, did it make sense to correct the record?

“I assure you that I don’t want to get hurt, either,” Irene said. It seemed like a good middle ground. Maybe it was an advance apology. What the hell was she thinking?

She entered the library to find Jonathan standing over an array of weapons splayed out on the plush tea-stained carpet. In addition to the advanced M16 knockoff that she recognized as a CAR-15, she noted an assortment of hand grenades—antipersonnel fragmentation grenades as well as nominally nonlethal flash-bangs—a roll of detonating cord and several electronic gadgets she’d never seen, and whose purpose was unknown to her.

“I understand you’ve been through the training for HRT,” Jonathan said, “so I figure you know most of what you’re looking at.”

An invisible hand pulled a string on her spine, launching a chill. How did he know this? She chose to say nothing, but for the first time in a long while, she realized that she and her Bureau were not necessarily on the top of the intel food chain.

“I see a lot of expensive weaponry,” Irene said. “And I have to tell you up front that if you expect me to pay for all of this, you’ll need to take a payment plan.”

“I do like my toys,” Jonathan said. “But these are on me.”

Irene’s bullshit bell clanged. “Please tell me you didn’t raid an arsenal.”

He smiled. “Hardly. Let’s just say I have means. Here’s the thing, though: You can’t touch any of this with your bare hands.” He handed her two pairs of gloves, one latex and one cotton. “Because of the nature of my day job, I’m invisible. Because of the nature of yours, you might as well walk around with a swarm of paparazzi.”

“There must be ten thousand dollars’ worth of materiel here. Are you telling me that you just do this as a hobby?”

“You’re asking as a curious citizen, right? Not as an FBI agent.”

“Oh, I gave up the high ground as an FBI agent about ten minutes after we met.”

“I’m in the business of right versus wrong,” Jonathan said. “We live in the greatest nation on Earth—and I’ve offered up my life for her on countless occasions—but we let too many bad guys turn the Constitution into a cynical weapon to wield against innocent people. I’ve decided to dedicate my life to leveling the playing field.”

“So your answer is to be a vigilante?”

“You can use a pejorative word if you want,” Jonathan said. She detected a note of agitation. “In my mind, justice is a better one. But the fact remains that you don’t want to have fingerprints, fibers, or DNA associated with any of it.”

Irene waited for the rest.

“We’ll get you coveralls,” Jonathan continued. “At some point, Jennings may recognize you. If that happens, your only route to survival is to lie through your teeth. He’s going to say that you were there in the room when his Constitutional rights were violated, and when you look him in the eye, you’ll need one-hundred-percent credibility when you deny everything.”

Something about the premise excited Irene. She understood that she should have been appalled, but in context, it was damn near exciting. “When do we get started?” she asked.

“We’re waiting for a friend of mine,” Jonathan said. “When he gets here, we can start into the serious planning.”

The friend turned out to be a giant of a man named Brian. The last name was Dutch and she couldn’t begin to pronounce it. Van de Something. He preferred to go by the name of Boxers, whatever that meant. At six-foot-huge, he literally filled the doorway as he entered the library. Unlike a lot of big men, Boxers fit his size and was handsome in his own way. Like Digger, he wore his hair too long, and his beard would have made a Mississippi biker proud. When he spoke, his deep bass voice rumbled the walls.

“This is Irene Rivers,” Jonathan said by way of introduction.

“You’re the FBI lady,” Boxers said. As he shook her hand, his grip, like Jonathan’s before, was surprisingly gentle. “I’m sorry to hear about your little girls. We’ll get them back for you soon.”

“Box is a fellow noncom with the Unit. I’ve known him for years and I trust him with my life.”

“That’s because I’ve saved it so many times,” Boxers said.

“Truer words,” Jonathan said. “She’s coming with us.”

Boxers’ face fell.

“She’s had HRT training,” Jonathan added.

“Have you ever shot anyone?” Boxers asked.

“Please don’t show me the length of your penis,” Irene said. “I can’t possibly compare.”

Laughter burst from Jonathan, even as Boxers turned red. One sentence, issue closed.

“So, what’s the plan?” Boxers asked when Jonathan could breathe normally again.

“Funny you should ask,” Jonathan said. “That’s why I invited you to the party.”

The plan came together quickly, and no plan had ever been simpler at its heart: Snatch and interrogate. Of course there were about a thousand moving parts in the middle, any one of which could derail everything, but Irene chose to stay focused on the goal: seeing Ashley and Kelly smiling back at her, alive and thriving.

Alive.

The alternative to that one word was too terrible to think about.

Jennings lived alone in a small row house in a seedy part of Baltimore, very urban, very working class. The snatch would be the hardest part. To pull that off without alerting the neighbors could be a huge feat on its own. If it went wrong, and someone called the police, her FBI credentials would be of no help. In fact, they might even prove to be a burden. For the plan to work—for it to get past the first step—stealth would be the key. That meant no shots fired, which was easier said than done when you were invading a private residence with guns drawn and safeties off.

It was just a little after midnight when Irene and her two team members glided their blacked-out black van into position in front of Jennings’s row house.

“How sure are you that this is the address?” Jonathan asked.

Irene had spent at least thirty hours of her life combing through this place during the Harrelson case and its aftermath. “One hundred percent,” she said.

“Can you go a little higher?” Boxers asked from the driver’s seat. Jonathan was riding shotgun while Irene occupied the only row of seats behind the front buckets.

“The more pertinent question is whether he’s home,” Irene offered. “On that I have no idea.”

“I can help there,” Jonathan said. He pointed through the windshield. “See that phone booth?” he asked.

It took her a few seconds, but then she got it. It wasn’t a booth so much as it was a platform connected to the side of a building. “Yes.”

“You still have his number?” It was part of the planning research.

“I do.” Irene was already sliding the side door open. Could it really be this simple?

Even at this late hour, the air felt heavy with humidity as Irene walked to the phone. She did her best to ignore the weight and additional heat of her body armor, focusing her mind on the protection it would provide if this turned into a shooting war. When she arrived at the phone, she lifted the receiver and slipped a quarter into the slot. She dialed the 410 area code and number. At this hour, if the line were answered at all, she expected that it would be picked up after at least three or four rings. She was startled, then, when she heard the click after the first ring.

“Hello?”

She’d recognize that voice out of a crowd of ten thousand people.

“Can I speak to Pamela?” She’d dropped her voice a quarter octave and feigned a Southern accent.

A pause.

Oh, shit, he suspects something!

“Who?”

“Pamela,” Irene repeated.

“Who is this?”

She heard suspicion in his voice, maybe a note of panic. “Is this four one oh . . .” She repeated the phone number she’d called with a middle digit transposed.

“Do you know what time it is?” Jennings snapped. “You’ve got a wrong number.”

Click.

Irene closed her eyes and released a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. Thank God. She’d gotten away with it. As she walked back to the van, she gestured with two thumbs up, and the doors opened right away.

“He’s there,” Irene said as she came within earshot. She pulled a stocking cap out of her pocket, fiddled with it till she found the front, and pulled it onto the top of her head.

Neither man said a word, but their body language showed that they were ready for whatever lay ahead. As he slid the door to the van closed, Jonathan handed Irene a Heckler and Koch MP-5 machine pistol. “You’ve used one of these, right?” he asked.

The nine-millimeter mini-assault rifle was a standard armament for the Hostage Rescue Team, but she’d never been particularly enamored of it. Chambered in nine millimeter, the weapon presented a rapid rate of fire, but the small round had a bad record for knock-down capability.

“I’ve used them, yes,” Irene said. She slipped the combat sling over her shoulder.

“If it comes down to a shoot-out,” Jonathan said, “just keep your front sight on the center of mass. If you cut out the core, the rest of the bad guy will fall with it.”

Irene felt a swell of indignant anger. She neither needed nor appreciated marksmanship lessons from an Army grunt.

Irene noted that Jonathan carried a Colt 1911 .45 on his hip, cocked and locked, and that Boxers carried what looked like a derringer against his size, but that she in fact knew to be a standard military-issue Beretta nine-millimeter. They’d given her a choice of sidearm, and she’d chosen a nine-millimeter SIG-Sauer P228 just like the one she trained with every week on the FBI range. Familiarity was key when it came to shooting straight, but she was grateful not to have to worry about ballistics tracing back to her own weapon if someone ended up getting shot.

As she approached the front door to the row house, Irene noted that Jennings had replaced the locks that had been busted up in the original raid, but that otherwise, the façade looked just as worn and weathered as it always had.

“We’re all good on the plan, right?” Jonathan whispered. He pulled the front of his own stocking cap to unfurl the mask that would cover everything except his eyes and his mouth. “There’s nothing subtle about it. We crash in, we snatch the son of a bitch, bag him and bind him, and get the hell out. Time inside shouldn’t be more than a minute.” He looked at Irene. “Big Guy and I have worked a lot together in the past, so we’re going to handle the rough stuff, okay? Rattler, you provide eyes and cover. Yes?”

Irene nodded and pulled her own face mask into place. If a car had been cruising by, the driver would no doubt have been terrified by what he saw. “Yes,” she said. Because of the need for anonymity, Jonathan had given her the code name Rattler. His own was Scorpion, and Boxers’ was Big Guy.

“Good. Let’s go.” He turned to his big friend. “Your turn,” he said.

Irene hadn’t noticed the three-foot thirty-five-pound cylindrical steel battering ram that Boxers carried in his other hand, or that he had likewise blanked out his face. Jonathan stepped aside to leave room while the big man gripped the handles at the front and rear of the ram, squared off perpendicular to the door, and then like a human Da Vinci’s Cradle, swung the plug of steel in a giant underhand arc that contacted the door right at the sweet spot, shattering those shiny new locks and propelling what was left of the splintered door inward on its hinges till it slammed against the wall.

Jonathan squirted through the opening first, followed by Boxers, and together, they streamed up the stairs to the bedroom level, leaving Irene to push the door closed and monitor the first floor, which, in the dim light that streamed in from the street, looked like it might have been burgled. Stuff was strewn everywhere, on the floor, draped over what little furniture there was. When she noticed that the detritus included multiple pizza boxes, complete with leftover pizza still inside, she knew that it was just Jennings being true to form.

Jonathan had been right when he’d warned that there would be nothing subtle about the approach. They sounded like a wrecking crew on the second floor, their heavy footsteps combining with crashing furniture and doors to create a cacophony that rattled the whole structure. Surely, given the age of these homes and the thinness of the walls, they were awakening the neighbors.

But where was the shouting to get down and show hands? Where were the protests from Jennings to be left alone?

He’s down here.

The thought arrived fully formed and devoid of doubt. He’d answered the phone quickly, hadn’t he? That meant he wasn’t yet asleep. It made perfect sense, then, that he would be on the first floor, not on the second. Or maybe the basement.

Shit.

She reached first for the MP5, but then let it go and drew her SIG. She’d fired thousands of rounds through the carbine, but tens of thousands of rounds through the pistol. She assumed a modified Weaver stance, a two-handed grip on the weapon that turned her left side to whatever threat lay out there, and she pivoted her whole body as she scanned the shadows for Jennings. She kept her finger out of the trigger guard even more consciously than usual, knowing that to kill this animal would be to lose track of her daughters.

Ashley and Kelly. Ashley and Kelly.

He wasn’t in the living room and he wasn’t in the center hall. That left either the dining room on the right or the kitchen that lay behind it. The kitchen where all the knives rested in the drawers. The kitchen where—

“Scorpion! The back door!” Irene yelled. “He’s bolting!” Again, no doubt. Irene took off at as close to a run as she could manage through the cluttered dining room, pushing furniture aside and vaulting over even more crap on the floor, as she made her way to the swinging saloon doors that separated the dining room from the kitchen.

She’d spent so much time in this place during the investigation that she felt as if she’d grown up here. She didn’t need additional light to know that the appliances were all an awful shade of brown, or that the wallpaper was an even more awful shade of orange.

Her eyes went right to the back door, which lay wide open. Past the sound of her own labored breathing, she could hear footsteps outside, nearly lost in the thunder of footsteps pounding back down the interior stairs as Scorpion and Big Guy hurried to catch up.

Irene slid to a stop before exposing herself to the outside through the exterior kitchen door, just in case Jennings had found himself a weapon and was lying in wait. Leading with her SIG, she pivoted out onto the stoop and was relieved to find that the Jennings’s head start was not as large as she had feared. She was doubly relieved to find that he’d made a huge mistake.

In a tight chase, when the chasers are limited to their feet as their primary mode of transportation, the smart play was always to run for it. With a thirty- or forty-second head start, it might be smart to try to start the car—or in Jennings’s case, a crotch-rocket Suzuki motorcycle—but with less lead than that, you screw yourself with the time it takes to find keys, get them into the ignition, and accelerate away before your highly motivated pursuers tear you apart.

Irene holstered her weapon even as she ran down the three stairs to the alleyway behind the town house. She was going to do this the old-fashioned way. The satisfying way.

Jennings looked up just seconds before the impact. His eyes looked like billiard balls as he calculated what was coming his way. He hurried to don his motorcycle helmet.

He never came close. The helmet flew five feet as Irene hit him at a dead run, driving her shoulder into the spot just below the juncture of his neck and his breastbone. He barked like a dog as the air was expelled from his lungs, and his arms flailed as Irene’s momentum drove him clear of the bike and back into the rickety fence that separated Jennings’s backyard from the next door neighbors’.

Lights came on next door and a dog barked. Stealth was no longer part of the equation. From here on out, it was about speed, and before Irene could even process the pleasure of beating the crap out of this guy, Big Guy’s beefy hands were on her shoulders, lifting her like she weighed nothing and placing her to the side while Scorpion stepped over the mess and slipped a black hood over Jennings’s head. That done, he rolled the monster onto his stomach and nearly ripped Jennings’s arms out of their sockets as he pulled them behind his back and cinched his wrists together with flex cuffs.

“Let me go!” Jennings yelled. “Help!”

Jonathan kicked him in the ribs, and leveraged him to his feet by lifting his arms.

Jennings yelled again, but after a second kick, he fell silent. He seemed to have gotten the point that quiet was better than noisy.

Irene stepped out of the way as Big Guy took over for Scorpion, hoisting the bound and bagged Barney Jennings over his shoulder like a duffel bag and leading the way back to up the steps, through the house, and out to the waiting van, where he dumped him heavily onto the floorboard.

“Get in and sit on him,” Boxers said. “We’ve got company.” A man and a woman in nightclothes had appeared on the porch of the house next door. They both looked terrified.

As Boxers walked around the front to the driver’s seat and Jonathan sat shotgun, Irene rolled the door shut and literally sat on their prisoner. The sound of sirens rose in the distance.

“That went well,” Boxers said as he eased away from the curb.

“Take it nice and slow,” Jonathan said. “Draw as little attention as possible. We only need a mile and a half.” As he spoke, he pulled off his mask. Boxers did the same, and so did Irene. As long as the bag stayed in place over Jennings’s head, they shouldn’t have to worry about being recognized.

“You know those sirens are for us, right?” Irene asked. “Somebody called the police.”

Jennings shifted under her. “Police?” he said. Muffled by the bag, his voice sounded strained under her weight. “You’re not the police? Who the hell are you?”

Irene bounced on him. Hard. “We’re the beginning of the worst weeks of your life.”

Jonathan turned in his seat to face her. He was smiling.

“You can’t do this!” Jennings protested. “This is kidnapping.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Irene replied.

“But I have rights. You can’t do this.”

She bounced on him again, harder this time. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll do something a lot worse that I don’t have a right to do.”

“Face it, asshole,” Big Guy said from the front. “From here on out, you’re one-hundred-percent victim. Whatever happens to you from here on out—good or bad—is because we make it happen.” A beat. “And if that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, you’re not paying attention.”

“But I didn’t do anything!”

Irene drew her SIG and thumped him on the head with the butt of the grip. “What part of shut up confused you?” It was a solid thump, too, one she was pretty sure had drawn blood.

He shut up.

Jonathan asked, “Assuming that the neighbors called this in as a kidnapping, how long will it take them to get organized enough for road blocks and such?”

Irene had no idea. The Harrelson case was the only one she’d ever worked with Baltimore PD, and their only corner of it was the investigation subsequent to Jennings’s arrest. They seemed professional enough, but there were too many moving parts to even attempt an honest answer to Jonathan’s question.

She decided to fake it. “They’ll have an officer respond to the scene and speak to the caller. If he’s convinced, he’ll call dispatch with a description of the van. Since it’s a kidnapping, they’ll roll a lot of units to it. Once they find out that Assface here is the alleged victim, though, they might just slow to a stroll. I figure we’ve got a good seven to ten minutes before we have to worry too hard.”

“From then or from now?”

“With the two or three minutes we’ve already lost, it’ll be less than seven to ten minutes.”

They got caught by a red light. “Wouldn’t you know?” Jonathan said.

“Tick tock,” Boxers said. “Want me to run it?”

“Negative. If this adventure ends everything for me, it’s not going to be because of a traffic violation.”

As the words cleared Jonathan’s lips the world in front of the windshield filled with Baltimore Police cars. A five-car motorcade of flashing lights and screaming sirens streaked straight at them.

“Ah, shit,” Boxers said. “This isn’t good.”

“Hold fast,” Jonathan said. He’d moderated his tone to something soothing. “We’re just out for a midnight drive.”

“Like they’ll buy that.”

“If we bolt, we’ll have nothing.”

“I concur,” Irene said.

Big Guy gave a sardonic laugh. “Oh, well if you concur, then I feel better.”

The cops were coming really hot, closing the final two blocks that separated them with blistering speed.

“Holy shit,” Jonathan said.

Irene got it and smiled. “They’re not coming for us,” she announced. The lead cop car switched his siren from wail to yelp as he flew past without stopping. “They’re all headed for the crime scene.” As if they’d been listening, the entire parade raced past them and disappeared down the street behind them.

“All right,” Boxers said. “I’ll take that kind of luck.”

“We’ll need to hurry now,” Irene said. “They’ll have noticed our vehicle as they passed. Once word goes out that the bad guys were in a van, they’ll come back in a hurry.”

Jonathan nodded once and smacked the driver on the shoulder. “You heard the lady. Drive fast and take chances.”

“Now you’re sounding like my mother,” Big Guy said. He stomped on the gas, and the van lurched forward, propelling Irene off of Jennings, who responded immediately by clamoring along the floorboards in an effort to find his feet.

Irene found hers faster and settled him down with a savage kick. Honestly, she was aiming at his stomach, but she felt no remorse when her boot found his balls instead. Jennings collapsed with a choking cough. “Oh, my God,” he gasped. He drew his knees up to his chest and crossed his ankles. Without sight, he must have been terrified of whatever the next blow would be.

“Way to go, Rattler,” Big Guy said with a laugh. “Take no shit from anybody.”

Jonathan was laughing, too, but she wasn’t sure she understood why.

“No,” Scorpion said, “Rattler’s not a good enough name. Doesn’t do it for me anymore. We’re going to call you Wolverine. Fast, scrappy, and mean as hell when you’re cornered.”

As if she cared what the hell her handle would be among a team she’d never see again. Just for an added bit of security while Jennings was in a docile state, she zip-tied his crossed ankles.

He said something like, “Oh, God,” she thought, but it was hard to hear through the bag and the gagging.

From the back of the van, cloaked in darkness, it was hard to tell where they were or where they were going. She knew from the planning session that they were headed to a place called Pier Seven, where Scorpion had arranged for a third party to park a helicopter. Given the stakes, they’d driven past the pier and verified the presence of the chopper before they’d raided Jennings’s place. She knew it sat on the harbor, nearly due south of Jennings’s house, amidst some kind of petroleum tank farm, but other than that, she didn’t know enough about the layout of Baltimore to divine a decent idea of how close they were to being out of danger.

Ashley and Kelly.

During the hot part of the op, she had been able to put the plight of her little girls in that locked-up section of her brain where emotion was never allowed. Now the rush of desperation returned. Every moment that passed was a moment when they were separated from her. A moment when they continued to suffer whatever torment this monster had devised for them. Having kicked his balls, now she wanted to cut them off, feed them to him. She bet that that would by God get his attention.

Time had slowed to a stop, even as the world flew by in a blur through the windshield. Irene wished she’d glanced at her watch when this talk of response times had first started. She told herself that it couldn’t possibly have been as long as it seemed, but then she didn’t know whether she could trust what she told herself.

With her prisoner in custody, her die had been cast, her Rubicon crossed. She had committed to a path that would turn her into the kind of felon that she’d sworn to hunt down and remove from society. She’d committed to violating a long line of fast-held principles that had guided her life until now, and at one level, it bothered her that she felt no remorse.

Jennings had earned every bit of what lay ahead for him, first through the abduction of the Harrelson boys, and now—How dare he!—by seeking revenge on her by terrorizing two innocent young girls. In the pantheon of unspeakable punishments, none was painful enough to account for that.

If time crawls by slowly for me, what nightmare must Ashley and Kelly be living?

“Looks like we’re going to make it,” Big Guy said as he swung a tight left turn. “That’s our bird out there on the end of the pier.”

Finally. Through the darkness, Irene hadn’t seen the towering fuel tanks that were so obvious in the satellite images that Scorpion had been able to obtain. As for the helicopter, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know how they’d swung that. The headline here was that the chopper was only a couple of hundred yards away, and when they arrived and got airborne, the first stage of their mission could be hailed as a success.

Pier Seven was literally a pier—a long stretch of wooden planks supported by pilings that stretched far out into the water. The helicopter—it looked like something a police department might fly—sat at the very end, visible only as a chopper-shaped stain against the night. As she took in the geography, Irene realized that they might have just stumbled onto the first major hitch in their planning.

How were they going to get Jennings’s bound body from the van to the end of the pier? What would they do with the van? They couldn’t just leave it out there to be seen. Not only would it be found quickly, but it would also give away the secret of their escape plan. Surely they weren’t going to drive all the way down and all the way back just to have to walk all the way back down again.

She got her answer when Big Guy pulled the van to a stop at the near end of the pier.

“Everybody out,” Jonathan said.

Jennings started to buck again—jerky, spasmodic movements that Irene interpreted as the onset of panic. She was glad that she’d thought to bind his ankles.

“Don’t worry about Assface,” Big Guy said, reading Irene’s thoughts. “I’ll take care of him.” Rather than stepping out the door and walking around, Boxers climbed over and around the engine cowling that separated driver from shotgun. “But if he gives me any trouble, I’ll drop him in the water and see how well he swims with his hands and feet tied.”

Jennings settled down again. Apparently, he’d caught the not-so-subtle subtext. Irene didn’t doubt that Big Guy’s words were more promise than bluff. She’d never met a man who exuded such lethality. Yet he did it without a trace of psychopathy. That couldn’t be easy to do.

Irene moved out of the way to make room for Boxers’ massiveness as he all but filled the van’s cargo area. She slid the side door open and found Jonathan waiting for her just outside.

“Have you got all your kit?” he asked.

Irene patted herself down, running a touch-inventory of her pockets and her weapons. “Yes.”

“Are you sure? The police are going to scour everything.”

“Positive,” she said, though after a buildup like that, how could anyone claim to be positive about anything?

“All right, then. Let’s go.”

Irene hesitated. “We’re not going to help Big Guy?”

“Trust me,” Jonathan said as he turned and led the way down the pier. “More times than not, the last thing Big Guy wants is help.”

It was every bit of seventy-five yards—maybe farther—to the end of the pier. When they were about halfway, Irene dared a look behind and was surprised to see how close Big Guy was, moving quickly and easily despite his size, his gear, and Jennings’s weight slung over his shoulders.

“Do I want to know where you got your hands on a helicopter?” Irene asked Jonathan. “Or how you convinced the owner to park it here and leave it?”

Jonathan flashed one of his smiles at her over his shoulder. “I imagine you do,” he said. “But you’d hate yourself for knowing after you got back to your FBI office.”

Irene caught the meaning. Under the circumstances, there were many details that she was probably better off not knowing.

Arriving at the chopper, Jonathan pulled open the side door—the cargo door. Clearly, he knew that it would be unlocked. He moved without hesitation, indicating to her that whatever accomplices he had were damned reliable.

In the near distance, sirens began to crescendo.

“Hear that?” Jonathan asked.

“They know about the van,” Irene said.

Jonathan nodded. “We’ll make it,” he said. Again, no room for doubt, though she suspected that his confidence was entirely unfounded.

Big Guy arrived ten seconds later and dumped Jennings onto the floor of the aircraft. “You know they’re almost here, right?” he said. No urgency in his voice. If anything, he sounded amused.

Jonathan replied, “If you’d stop strolling and step it up a little, we’d make better time.”

“Kiss my ass, you tiny little man.” Was it possible to utter those words with affection? Because that’s what Irene heard in his tone. These were interesting men.

“You’re next,” Jonathan said, offering Irene a hand to help her inside.

She appreciated the gesture, but she climbed in on her own. She was awash in testosterone as it was; she didn’t see the need to encourage more.

Jonathan stepped in right behind her, and he slammed the side door shut before he settled into a seat.

The only helicopters that Irene had ridden in had been of the bare-bones variety, a step up, she imagined, from Spartan military aircraft, but only a tiny step. This chopper, by contrast, was all about executive comfort, with cream-colored soft leather captain’s chairs for seats, each of which had its own phone. Plush mauve carpeting covered the floors. She started to say something about the luxury, but stopped herself when she realized that such a comment might provide Jennings with an intelligence benchmark that could work against them.

Boxers settled himself into the pilot’s seat—the right-hand front seat—and threw switches seemingly as reflex. Seconds later, the engine started, and seconds after that, the rotors began to whine and turn.

“Hang on, everybody,” Big Guy called over the noise. “When liftoff happens, it’s going to happen fast.”

“Who are you people?” Jennings cried. Literally cried, as in past a sob. “Please don’t do this. I don’t know what this is about, but I swear to God you don’t need to do this.”

“Shut up, Assface.” They all said it in unison.

Chapter 6

Jonathan made a point of not telling Irene specifically where they were going. “You have to understand,” he’d explained, “that the people I deal with are the very best at what they do, but what they do exposes them to enormous risk, both real and legal. The fact that you’re with the FBI prevents you from ever being their friend. That doesn’t mean that you’re their enemy—anything but, because these people are the most devout patriots you’ll ever meet—but it means that you can never be fully trusted.”

Irene was not in the least offended, but she was curious. “You trust me.”

His answer came quickly: “Only because Dom vouched for you.”

“Ouch.”

“Well, it’s true. Look, most government people mean well—they’d rather do good deeds than bad—but when the shit hits the fan, they get confused. Right and wrong gets trumped by career ambitions. I’ve spent my entire adulthood as other people’s pawn in a game where I’ve never been invited to the table. Where politicians’ dreams become my reality. My scars.”

He’d smiled as he prepared for the next part of his soliloquy. “It so happens that you have pledged allegiance to the one organization above all others that values career advancement over public safety. Because of Dom’s endorsement, I’ll stipulate that you’re one of the good guys, but you won’t get that same benefit of doubt from anyone else in my universe.”

Irene thought about his words as they bounced through the night in a rattletrap Ford Explorer toward what appeared to be a stand-alone barn in the middle of a field. The vehicle had been waiting for them when they’d touched down a few hundred yards from there. The keys had been left in the ignition, but there was no sign of a driver. They’d flopped Jennings onto the floor of the cargo bay and closed the tailgate.

His panic was setting in deeper, manifesting itself in childish whining and whimpering noises. All traces of anger and righteous indignation were gone. Irene couldn’t tell for sure, but it sounded like he kept repeating, “Please, please, please . . .”

And it got to her a little. Suffering was suffering, after all, and just because Jennings was a monster didn’t mean that he wasn’t still human.

“Don’t let it in,” Jonathan said, barely above a whisper. “This is a head game. He’s got to be terrified for any of this to work. The more terrified he is, the less we actually have to hurt him.”

Out of nowhere, Irene felt a rush of remorse. What they were doing was wrong. It was inexcusable, and no grand efforts at justification could make it anything but inexcusable. Systems existed for a reason. Rules existed for a reason, as did the Constitution and the protections it bestowed. Now that they were coming closer to the moment when what was left of her soul would become mortgaged beyond redemption, she wasn’t sure that she could go through with it.

“This is always hard,” Jonathan said. His ability to read her was startling. His accuracy was frightening. “And I mean always. It never gets easier.”

“So you’ve tortured a lot of people before?”

“I’ve extracted my share of information, yes. Never gratuitously, and always for a good cause. And through that, I’ve saved a lot of lives. That’s what you need to stay focused on—the lives that will be saved. Two lives that have every right to be lived to their fullest. Stay focused on that, and this will all suck less. Not a lot less, but some.”

Irene didn’t know what to say. She had abandoned the moral high ground, and she’d done it willingly. Was there really all that much real estate separating kidnapping from torture, especially when both were employed in pursuit of the same goal? She’d already walked away from due process as a viable option, so once that was done, the rest was just details, wasn’t it? She ignored the nausea that churned her stomach. The time for second-guessing had passed. The train had left the station. The die had been cast. How many clichés could there possibly be for the same thought?

She’d go through with this because it was the only decision that made sense. Once the mortal sins were stacked three feet high, one more couldn’t possibly make a difference.

They arrived at the barn. Boxers threw the transmission into park, and they all pushed their doors open. “I’d like you to come out on my side,” Scorpion said.

She gave him an odd look.

“Humor me, okay?” he said.

Seeing no harm in the request—and seeing no play for advantage—she did as he asked. She scooted across the Explorer’s backseat as Big Guy walked around to the back and opened the tailgate.

When she was on the ground, Jonathan pulled her to the side. “I don’t want you to actively participate in the interrogation,” he said, barely above a whisper.

Irene bristled. “We’re talking about my daughters.”

“Exactly. And to get them back, we need to project a single, consistent message.”

“I can do that,” she said.

“You’re taking this personally,” Jonathan said in a modulated tone that she knew he’d engineered to be soothing. “You have to take it personally. I, on the other hand, have the freedom to take it tactically. I don’t know what peculiar brand of sick fuck Assface is, but if he sees you and recognizes you, it might encourage him to play. The fact that you are there might just make his day. We don’t need that.”

Irene cocked her head as a random character analysis resolved in her head. This Assface moniker was important to Jonathan. It was the exclusive way that he referred to Jennings. She realized that it was a strategy to dehumanize the man he was intending to hurt. In a twisted way, that made Irene think better of the man. If he had to play head games with himself to carry out his duties, that meant there was a conscience under that granite exterior.

“I defer to your expertise,” Irene said. “But I want to be in the room.”

Jonathan’s posture shifted to something that looked combative. No fists, but a deep, settling inhalation. She read it as the beginning of an objection that he then swallowed. “Okay,” he said. “But your mask stays on. That’s not negotiable. And if he gets disgusting in his views toward his victims, you need to keep your mouth shut. I need your word on that.”

With each passing moment, Irene felt as if she were getting demoted farther and farther down the grown-up ladder.

“You have my word,” she said.

A burst of noise snapped their attention around to the rear of the Explorer, where Big Guy was wrestling with Jennings. The prisoner seemed to sense that the bad part of his night had finally arrived, and he was yelling incoherently and bucking on Boxers’ shoulders like a grounded fish.

“No, I got this,” Big Guy said. “Don’t hurt yourselves.”

Irene heard the accusation of laziness in the subtext, but the fact was that he did seem to have it, with energy to spare. She took her lead from Jonathan and just stayed out of the way as Boxers carried his load to the barn’s massive front doors. With the human package slung over his shoulder, Big Guy pulled the big door open and disappeared into the darkness.

The scale of the under-lit interior was hard to comprehend. This was a barn that could have been converted into a community center. The dimensions were huge-by-huge-by-huge. Boxers carried his load to the center of the massive space, where he set him on the ground with surprising gentleness. As far as Irene could tell, the floor was made of compacted dirt, though it was surprisingly solid. She sensed that this place had existed for a very, very long time. A hundred years or more. If that were the case, then it was entirely possible that the dirt merely covered an ancient wooden floor.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Jennings whined. “What are you going to do to me?”

Boxers said nothing as he picked up a length of rope that had been left on the floor adjacent to one of the massive supporting pillars. He slid it under Jennings’s armpits and tugged for him to stand. Irene was surprised that he complied so easily. Under similar circumstances, she imagined that she would be fighting to the death rather than complying with a torturer’s wishes. On the other hand, she had never been one to prey on those who were weaker than she. Well, not until now.

A massive five-inch iron ring had been mounted through the center pillar, and it was through that that Boxers threaded the rope. When he was done, his prisoner stood at full attention, his arms pinioned behind his back and his ankles still bound. They kept his hood on, making Irene wonder why she had to keep her mask on. She didn’t question it, though.

“Please don’t hurt me,” Jennings whined, over and over again.

When Assface was thoroughly trussed and immobilized, Boxers stepped aside, and Jonathan approached. “Be a man,” Jonathan said. “Quit crying. It doesn’t change anything, and it just robs you of dignity.”

“Who are you?” Jennings asked. “Why are you doing this?”

Jonathan nodded to Big Guy, who punched Jennings in the gut. To Irene’s eye, it wasn’t an especially hard punch, but from the way Jennings yelled, you’d have thought that he’d been hit with a sledge hammer.

“Here’s the deal,” Jonathan said. “And listen up.” He paused. “Are you listening?”

“Yes, sir,” Jennings said.

“I’m not your master,” Jonathan snapped. “No need to call me sir. Just pay attention and answer questions. The key word there was answer. You’re not here to ask anything. You’re not here to learn anything. I’m not even sure if you’re here to survive. That will be determined by your answers, and the spirit in which they are delivered. Are you following me so far?”

The bag on Jennings’s head bobbed. “I think so,” he said.

“Good,” Jonathan said. He took a deep breath. “By now, you’ve figured out that we are not police. We don’t give a flying shit about your rights or about how to game the justice system. We’re here to get information, pure and simple. Is this making sense to you?”

Another nod. “Yes.”

“Tell me why you think we might be doing this,” Jonathan said. “What information do you think we might be seeking?”

Jennings’s answer came too quickly. “I don’t know.”

Jonathan again looked to Boxers, who delivered another punch to the gut. Jennings yelled louder.

“Your shouting means nothing,” Jonathan said. “That’s why we did the whole helicopter thing. You’re in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing that stands between you and a yard-waste shredder is the truth. Can you wrap your head around that?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it,” Jonathan warned. “We’re going to verify what you tell us. That means that you’re going to have a few very long days. If you tell us something and it turns out not to be true, you’re going to be punished. We start with punches, but as we progress, we get to cutting off body parts. You don’t want us cutting off any of your body parts, do you?”

Jennings squirmed in his bonds, as if he could make a difference. “Oh, God, no. Please, no.”

“There you go,” Jonathan said. “That’s the spirit. Now, back to my original question. Why do you think we’re here? What information do you think we might be looking for?”

Jennings took his time answering. His breathing rate doubled. Irene could only imagine the conflict he was suffering. Where did truth and survivability bifurcate?

“Is it about the kids?” Jennings asked. His voice was barely audible.

“Excuse me?” Jonathan said. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“Is it about the kids!” Jennings shouted it this time. Irene felt a shot of adrenaline. This asshole knew. He had them.

“Tell me,” Jonathan said. His voice stayed perfectly modulated, as if this was a conversation, not an interrogation. “Is there a reason why we should be talking to you about kids?”

“They didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute me,” Jennings said. “I don’t have to—”

This time, Boxers acted without a prompt from his boss. He delivered a powerful slap to the hood. Jennings yelled.

Jonathan looked annoyed. “There you go letting the law get in the way between you and the truth,” he said. “That’s going to hurt every time it happens. I promise you.”

“This is coerced testimony. You can’t use any of it.”

“That’s your last chance before we switch to the baseball bat.”

Jennings’s breath chugged behind the hood, a steam engine sound that caused the fabric to move in and out with each inhalation and exhalation.

“Where are the children, Barney?” Jonathan pressed again. When using the prisoner’s given name, his tone was softer.

More puffing.

“It’s so much easier if you just answer,” Jonathan coaxed. “It’s what you’re going to do anyway. Why not make it less painful?”

Jennings’s chest heaved and he blurted. “They’re dead.”

No, no, no, not my babies. Irene brought her hands to her mouth as she felt the blood drain from her head. Her knees buckled and she nearly fell. The only reason she didn’t was because she was able to flex her gut muscles enough to raise her own blood pressure. Her vision blurred; she heard a sob escape from her own throat. This wasn’t possible.

She saw Jonathan shoot a glance her way, and Boxers take two steps to catch her, but when they saw she was going to remain conscious, they went back to business.

“Did you kill them?” Jonathan asked.

“I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. I wanted them alive because, well, you know what I wanted to do. But the older one fought, and that encouraged the younger one. They started to make too much noise. I told them to be quiet, but they refused. Honest to God, they left me no choice.”

Irene realized that she’d drawn her SIG, but didn’t remember doing it.

“I’m sorry,” Jennings said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” Irene shouted. She pulled off her mask, leveled her weapon at his head and took five giant steps closer.

“Agent Rivers?” Jennings said. “Jesus, is that you?”

“Take his hood off,” Irene commanded.

If Jonathan had not responded as instantly as he did, she might have pointed the muzzle at him. As it was, he pulled the knot in the string at Jennings’s throat and lifted the hood away.

Jennings looked confused and a little blind when the hood first came off, but then his eyes grew huge when he saw the maw that was Irene’s pistol pointed at his eye. “No!” he cried. “Oh, God, no! Please! You were right, okay? You were right all along. I lied. They’re dead, and I’m sorry.”

Something clicked in her head. Something in that phrasing wasn’t right. She kept the pistol aimed at his eye, but she took a pound of pressure off of the trigger. “Who?” she asked.

“Huh?”

Who are you talking about? Who did you kill?”

“The kids! Jesus, how many times do I have to say it?”

“What kids?”

“The kids. The Harrelson boys. Who else?”

Irene felt the dizziness return, this time combined with unspeakable anger. “You know who else,” she said, but even as the words left her lips, she realized that he didn’t.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” he whined.

“My daughters,” Irene said. “What have you done with my daughters?”

His expression said everything. “Your daughters! Christ, I haven’t done anything. I haven’t touched anyone else. I swear to God. What happened to your daughters?”

Jonathan’s eyes were sad as he looked to her. He’d seen it, too. For once in his life, Jennings wasn’t lying. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Sorry. What a simple word that was. Hardly adequate to account for the collapse of her world, for the dissolution of everything that was good and kind in the world.

Irene wanted to kill Jennings, to mangle his body. She wanted to inflict unspeakable harm on him, if only to duplicate the unspeakable harm he had inflicted on the boys. Instead, she said, “Tell me where the bodies are.”

“You can’t prosecute me,” Jennings said. “Remember that.”

“I just want to give the Harrelson boys the dignity of a decent burial.”

Jennings came clean. He described the shallow graves that could be found along the wood line, just outside of Emmitsburg, near the Pennsylvania line. “You have to understand that it was an accident,” he said. “I never intended—”

They all jumped at the boom as Boxers fired a nine-millimeter bullet into Jennings’s brain. A pink cloud erupted from a spot just above his ear as he collapsed against his bonds.

Jonathan yelled, “Holy fuck, Big Guy!”

Boxers holstered his weapon. “You were done with him, right?”

“You just murdered him!” Irene shouted. Holy shit, how could this night go any more wrong?

“No, I didn’t,” Boxers said. His face showed pure disgust, a look you’d expect from someone who’d found mold on his bread. “You can’t murder a kid-toucher. Worst you can do is make the world better by taking him out of it.” He glared at Irene. “Go ahead and arrest me if you want.”

Irene opened her mouth to object, but she realized that she had nothing to say. On the scale of right versus wrong, he was on the side of the angels. On the scale of justice, how could she argue that accounts had not been settled?

“Don’t worry about the body,” Jonathan said. “The guy who owns this place is a friend. This is what he does. No one will ever find it.”

“This is what he does?” Irene gasped. “Good God, Digger, how can you know these people?”

Boxers chuckled. “Wow, she really is a rookie, isn’t she?”

Irene bristled.

“The proprietor’s paychecks come from Uncle Sam,” Jonathan said. “I call him Arc Flash, and he works on the darkest of the darkest sides.”

“That’s how he affords to live in such nice digs,” Boxers said. “Please tell me that none of this surprises you.”

“It shocks me,” she said. “I had no idea.”

“Does it bother you?” Big Guy asked. “That Uncle lives by different rules than he insists that you live by?”

Jonathan changed the subject. “Who else, Irene?” he asked. “The clock is ticking. Who else would have a reason to hurt you this way?”

Was it even possible to have such an enemy? In Irene’s experience, Jennings’s brand of monsterhood was unique. Was it possible for two such people to roam the Earth at the same time?

“I’ve arrested hundreds of people over the years,” she said. “I guess it’s possible that any one of them would want to hurt me through my children.” But that wasn’t true, was it? It took a particularly heartless brand of bad guy to target innocence. That was a unique brand of sociopathy.

With nothing left to do inside the barn, Jonathan led the way back outside. “Think harder,” he said as they crossed the threshold back into the darkness. “This isn’t random. The perpetrator is a copycat. He knew about the ransom demands from the Jennings case, and about the mechanisms for demanding the ransom.”

“That could be anybody,” Boxers said. “I don’t read the newspapers, but I knew some of that. It wasn’t exactly a case that flew under the radar.”

Irene wracked her brain. Thinking back to the ransom note, she tried to remember everything. She saw the note in her mind, every detail, from the spacing between the words to the font size. Was it too late to involve the police? Sure, she had sold her soul, and would go to jail when the world found out what she had done, but that was many times better than something bad happening to the girls.

Ashley and Kelly.

I will know and I will kill them.

Irene pulled to an abrupt halt as an unthinkable idea took shape in her mind. The suddenness of her action got the attention of the others. “What’s wrong?” Jonathan asked.

Irene held up a hand for silence, giving time for the details to sink in. She wasn’t sure yet what she was thinking, but there was something in there that rang a big bell.

I will know and I will kill them.

Whoever was doing this had inside knowledge. In her heart, from the very beginning, she’d suspected that the bad guy knew more than a random bad guy should know.

She brought her hand down and pivoted her head to face Jonathan, her jaw agape. “I know who it is,” she said.

Chapter 7

“Do you know what time it is?” Amanda Whitney said. She held the door open just a couple of inches. Still an FBI agent, at least for the time being, she had to show a modicum of deference to her boss, but that didn’t mean she had to let her invade her house at zero dark early.

Irene noted the angle of Amanda’s body relative to the door, the way she was pitched nearly sideways, making a point of showing only half of her body. “Are you shielding a firearm?” she asked. Her right hand wanted to rise to her SIG, but she felt that that was uncalled for. Due to the nature of this visit, Jonathan and Boxers waited in a car a block away, where they could provide precious little assistance if she needed it.

“I have a right,” Amanda said. “This is my home, and it’s late.”

“Yes on both counts,” Irene agreed. “Do you think I’m an enemy?”

Amanda’s eyes darted, and she leaned out to look both directions down the street. At least partially satisfied with what she saw, she withdrew into the foyer and ushered her guest inside. As Irene stepped across the threshold, she cast a glance toward the weapon in her hostess’s hand. She was shocked to see an entirely nonregulation stainless-steel Desert Eagle .44 Magnum.

“Were you expecting to repel an invasion of elephants?” Irene asked, nodding toward the cannon that some would call a pistol.

“Why are you here?” Amanda asked.

“Why are you so frightened?”

“You first. You came here, remember?” She closed the door and turned the dead bolt.

Irene’s eyes narrowed as she played a bluff. “Have you called the police yet?”

Amanda’s face showed just enough recognition to assure Irene that she’d hit the nerve she was going for. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do.” Irene let the words hang in the air.

Amanda held the Desert Eagle higher. The hammer was cocked and the safety was off. “I haven’t called anyone,” she said. “What do you know of it?”

“What did Tony tell you?”

Amanda’s features started to dissolve and she sat on the bottom step. “How did you even know? Is he dead?”

The question startled Irene. “Excuse me?”

Amanda seemed startled, too. Or, at the very least, confused. “You’re alive,” she said. “I figured that would mean that he was dead.”

“Is that what he said?”

Amanda cocked her head. “Are we even talking about the same thing?”

Irene looked around. The house was small, maybe seven hundred fifty square feet total on the ground floor. It seemed solid enough, and the way Amanda guarded the base of the stairs, she was certain that the kids were sleeping on the second level. Irene pointed toward the tiny darkened living room to the right of the foyer. “It’s been a long night,” she said. “May we sit down on real chairs?”

Amanda shot a worried glance up the stairs.

“You’ve got a blunderbuss and I’m a very good shot,” Irene coaxed. “”I think they’ll be okay.”

Amanda offered a wan smile. She looked exhausted. She rose from her step, gestured toward the living room, and followed Irene through the archway. “Anywhere,” she said.

Irene took one end of the love seat while Amanda took the other. Both faced the window, and they kept the lights off.

“What’s happening, Irene?” Amanda asked. She sounded close to tears.

“Tony kidnapped my children,” Irene said.

Amanda brought her free hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God. When?”

“Yesterday afternoon. What has he done to you, Amanda? I need to know everything. Every word.”

Amanda took her time gathering her thoughts. “He was so angry, Irene. Beyond angry. When we left your office that day, he could barely talk, he was so angry. We went out to TGI Friday’s that evening, and the whole time he sat there, he just got madder and madder. He said he was going to make you pay.” At that last sentence, Amanda rocked her head up to look directly into Irene’s eyes.

Irene nodded. “That’s why you thought he was going to kill me.”

Amanda’s head pivoted no. “Not at first. I just thought he was blowing off steam. Although the steam was blowing off at really high pressure. He got pretty drunk—stuck me with the check—but I figured that the morning would bring sanity. I mean let’s face it, we did screw up. We screwed up big time. Screw-ups bring consequences, right? I figured that he’d get into that head space all by himself.”

“But he didn’t,” Irene guessed.

“Not by a long shot.” A noise outside brought both their attentions to the front window. Amanda didn’t level her cannon at the glass, but she clearly was ready to. Irene had already shifted on the seat to make her own weapon readily available if it was needed.

“It’s been like that all night,” Amanda said with a deep sigh. “Every time I hear a noise, I think it’s him. Honest to God, when you rang the bell, I almost shot through the door.”

Irene felt a chill. “Thank you for your restraint. Your neighbors three blocks away thank you for your restraint, too.” The Desert Eagle fired bullets that only stopped when they got tired of flying. “You were saying . . . ?”

“As you probably know, we both took the last couple of days off. We didn’t want the scrutiny. We wanted the other agents in the squad to get all the trash-talking and rumors out of their systems before we came back.” She looked at the floor. “You know, came back to quit.”

Irene understood.

“We hung out. You know, finding comfort among the shunned. It wasn’t like a date or anything, more like commiseration. Only instead of finding some measure of peace, he just got angrier and angrier. He thought—” She stopped herself and wouldn’t look at Irene.

“Say it,” Irene said. “Whatever it is, just say it. I came to you, remember?”

Amanda sighed. “He thought you could have done more to intervene on our behalf. He thought you should have done more to intervene. He said terrible things about you. You’re a careerist, he said. You don’t give a shit about anybody else. You’re so set on advancement that you’d kill your own children to—” She seemed not to have heard herself before the words were already out. “I’m so sorry.”

Irene waved it away as nothing as her vision blurred with tears. She didn’t trust her voice to speak. Is that when he got the idea to take the children? she wondered.

Amanda cleared her throat, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, and continued. “Anyway, he blames you for all of it. For the AUSA’s refusal to prosecute, all the way down to the OPR review. He said he was going to get even.”

“And you didn’t think to contact someone to stop him?”

“Well, like I said, at first I thought he was just blowing off steam, but after a while, as I realized that he really meant what he was saying, yeah, I tried to talk him out of it. I told him that he was a sworn agent, and that I was, too. That’s all I said before he went really ballistic. He told me that crossing him would be the biggest, deadliest mistake of my life. When I pushed back and told him not to threaten me, he got this really cold look in his eyes. He said that my report would just be hearsay and that no one would ever take action on it. ‘But if you try,’ he said, ‘there are far more effective ways to get at you than getting directly at you.’ ”

Irene felt a chill.

“Those words froze my blood, Irene. He was threatening my children. They’re only babies.”

“So, you decided to stand by and let him kill me,” Irene said through a smirk.

Amanda looked away.

“When was the last time you saw Tony Mayo?” Irene asked. No sense dwelling on Amanda’s transgressions.

“That conversation was the last time. Two days ago.”

Irene nodded absently, not because she was agreeing with anything, but because nodding was a kind of crutch when she was thinking heady thoughts. She needed a next step—at least an idea for a next step.

So, Tony Mayo was their man. She knew that now, just as she knew that Tony would expect her to think that Barney Jennings had written the note and taken the girls. He bought himself important time with that move.

But time to do what?

“Let me ask you an unfair question, Amanda. You know Tony much better than I. Do you have any idea where he might have taken my daughters?” Her voice broke on the last word, causing her to clear her throat and look at the ceiling.

It was a throwaway question, a desperate question that should have prompted an instant no. Instead, Amanda fell silent.

“Amanda?”

“No,” she said, but the vowel was drawn out in an unspoken however. “I mean, I don’t know anything for a certainty, or even strongly enough to make an accusation.”

“Anything is better than nothing at this point.”

Amanda sighed. “Well, I was thinking about this,” she said, “when I feared for my boys. I worried about, you know, what might happen to them if Tony tried to do something. My thoughts kept going back to this huge prostitution case we’ve been working. We’ve been running surveillance on—”

“Gran Donnelin,” Irene said, bringing her hands to the sides of her head. Of course! Why hadn’t she put those pieces together for herself? A thirty-four-year-old ne’er-dowell, Donnelin was known to have peculiar sexual tastes, but nothing that had crossed the line from twisted and weird to illegal. The Bureau had received multiple unconfirmed reports that the first-generation Irish immigrant had been enslaving runaways and selling them off to Mexican brothels, but no real evidence had ever been found. In fact, none of the FBI’s sources south of the border had ever heard of Donnelin or any of his known aliases. As a result, the Bureau had been reduced just watching and following. After nearly four weeks, Donnelin hadn’t given them even the hint of a reason to cut a warrant.

“Do you think Tony knows him?” Irene asked.

“I don’t know that, no. But we did all the surrounding research into the, um, industry. You know, the young-girl prostitution business—”

“They’re calling it human trafficking now,” Irene said. Sort of sad, she thought, that so horrendous a crime could be so common as to earn its own catchphrase. Her heart rate doubled for the instant that she allowed herself to see her girls embroiled in such a nightmare.

“Sounds way too sterile for me,” Amanda said. “But the point I was making was that maybe Tony found some contacts that way. He wouldn’t need to go anywhere near Donnelin.”

Irene closed her eyes, wishing that it was possible to make all of this just go away. Tony could be anywhere—literally, anywhere. In the hours that they’d been tracking down Jennings, he could be on an entirely different continent.

No, she told herself, that was not true. This was not a planned crime, this was a fit of passion. He hadn’t had time to prepare passports and plan for the thousands of tiny details that were required for foreign transportation. Even when traveling on commercial airliners, foreign travel was complicated. Throw in all the moving parts of a human-smuggling operation, and only an idiot would try to do it on the fly. And Tony Mayo was no idiot.

From a distant corner of her brain, Irene told herself that the passing time only helped Ashley and Kelly. They were sweet little girls, even at their pissiest, and she told herself that over time, their charm would erode Tony’s anger away. He wasn’t a true monster, after all, not in the same vein as Jennings. Surely over time, he would realize the mistake he had made, and—

What? What would he do then? What could he do then? Even if he repented and changed his ways, and decided that he’d made a huge mistake, by then, he’d have two witnesses. He couldn’t ever return them to their home, not without surrendering himself to a life prison sentence.

Was the certainty of a life behind bars enough motivation to kill the girls?

No! No, that couldn’t possibly be the only recourse. What he’d be forced to do, she thought, would be to carry through with his original plan. He’d have to sell her daughters to a second monster.

Irene understood that all of this was wild conjecture on her part, but she needed that in order to have the courage to go on. There had to be hope. There had to be a scenario in her head that would justify all that she had done, and all that she was willing to do to get her little girls back. If that meant concocting wild stories and scenarios, well, so be it. It worked.

What she couldn’t do was—

Her pager beeped on her hip. She didn’t care who it might be or what they might want, but she pulled the electronic leash from her belt and checked the message. It was Paul Boersky’s direct line, followed by the suffix 911, which meant that it was an emergency. She and Paul had worked countless cases over the years, and she’d actually told him that she would be taking time off, and that she shouldn’t be disturbed until she returned. He wouldn’t have sent the page if it wasn’t important, and he wouldn’t have used the panic code if it hadn’t been damned important.

Irene braced herself. “May I use your phone?” she said.

Paul’s voice was heavy with concern. “Are you all right, Irene?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “What’s up?”

Paul dropped a beat. In her head, she could see him scratching a spot behind his left ear, his tell for being uncomfortable with a subject. “Look, I know that you’re up to something, and that it’s urgent. I heard it in your voice last time we spoke, and I hear it now. The fact that you’re not at the office in itself speaks volumes. I don’t know what’s going on, and I’ll stipulate that I probably don’t want to, but I want you to know that I’m here for you in case you need me.”

Irene appreciated the gesture of kindness, but resented the time it consumed to be delivered. “Thank you,” she said, though her tone told an entirely different story. “Is that why you paged me? To tell me that?”

“No,” he said. “I paged you because of what I pray is just a crank call. There’s a guy in North Carolina named Sam Sadler, he’s an attendant or a cashier at an Exxon station in someplace called Hoffman, population something like four. He called your line five times apparently, and then ultimately called the front, who snagged me as your partner.”

That was way more preamble than Irene either needed or desired. “What did he want?”

“His Exxon has a kind of store attached to it, and he said that a little family of three came in there to do some snack shopping. A father and two girls, maybe eleven and thirteen. Sadler said there was a weird vibe to them—”

Irene’s eyes flooded with tears that she fought desperately to control. This was it. This was the hope.

“—but he couldn’t really put his finger on why. Anyway, the older girl needed to go to the bathroom, and apparently, this freaked dad out. He told her that gas station bathrooms were dirty or some such, but Sadler did his best to set the guy’s mind at ease. Anyway, the girl ended up going to the bathroom, but on the way out, she tripped and knocked some cans off of a shelf. This really pissed dad off, and he hustled them out of the store. Here’s where it gets interesting. Sadler said that the little girl gave him, Sadler, a pleading look, and then cast a glance over to where the spilled cans lay.”

Please, God, just get to the point.

“When Sadler picked up the cans, he said he found one of your business cards on the floor among the cans.” Paul paused. “What’s going on, Irene? Are those girls yours? I tried calling your house before I paged you, and no one answered. Is someone coming at your children?”

Irene’s breathing started to race as she considered the possibilities. Now they at least had a patch of geography to start searching. “How long ago did this happen?” she asked.

“I hung up from Sadler just about a half hour ago, but he said he’d been trying to get in touch for well over an hour.”

“Did Mr. Sadler by chance get a license number?”

“He did, and it’s from a stolen vehicle. I’ve already taken the liberty of asking North Carolina PD to put out a BOLO for it.”

Irene nodded and pressed her hair off her forehead with her free hand. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. Do you have an address for this Mr. Sadler?”

“Irene?” Paul asked. His tone had changed to something between suspicion and sympathy. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Shit, shit, shit. This was why rules existed—if only to be able to share useful details with a wider audience. “Look, Paul,” she said. “Some bad things have happened in the past few hours, some of them at my hand.”

“Don’t need a confession,” Paul interrupted. “I just need to know if those are your daughters, who the bad guy is, and what I can do to help.”

By the time she finished telling him, she figured that he was sorry he asked.

Chapter 8

Irene said nothing as she departed Amanda’s house, leaving the once and future star agent to wonder what the hell had just transpired. Irene had made a mental note that if she, Irene, enjoyed anything close to a happy ending through all of this, she was going to pull every string she could find to make sure that the OPR report would not scuttle Amanda’s career.

She’d left Jonathan and Boxers in a 7-Eleven parking lot just a half block from Amanda’s house, and as she unloaded the details of her conversations with both Amanda and Paul Boersky, they grew progressively more excited.

“Congratulations,” Jonathan said. “You’ve got a data point on your daughters. That’s a place to start, but the real question is where does he plan to finish?”

“I’m ahead of you,” Irene said. “Clearly, he’s headed south, and something is drawing him there. I don’t think he had time to plan anything elaborate, but he had to plan something, which to me means that he has some connection to that part of the country. Paul is doing some research for me on the QT to see what if any connection Tony might have to the Carolinas or any of the Southern states. Even Texas and Mexico. There has to be something. There has to be a reason for him to be in North Carolina.”

Jonathan thought on that for just a few seconds. “I agree,” he said. “Let’s head south.”

A little more than an hour later, they were walking across the tarmac of a little regional airport outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, on their way toward a Gulfstream corporate jet. Between the three of them, they carried enough weapons and ammunition to conquer Spain.

“Okay,” Irene said, “I know you won’t give me a straight answer, but I have to ask. Where does all of this stuff come from? Where does all the money come from? Surely Uncle Sam doesn’t foot the bill.”

Jonathan coughed out a laugh. “God, I wish. No, this is all on me.”

Irene stopped. “What do you mean?”

Jonathan stopped, too, and he smiled. God, what a smile. “You’ve seen the house. Look up ‘rich’ in the dictionary. My picture is there.”

Irene wasn’t buying. There had to be something bigger than that. “No,” she said. “Really.”

Jonathan shrugged and nodded. “No, really,” he said.

“So, if you’re that rich, why would you risk your life in battle if you had enough money not to?”

Jonathan stopped short and turned on her. “You disappoint me, Wolverine,” he said. “If you have to ask that question, then I could never in a million years explain my answer.”

He turned and started walking again.

Irene felt stung. And embarrassed. She knew from her own experience that the truest heroes did what they did from a most solid place in their hearts. In the case of the elite military units in particular, theirs was a calling of service, and she had been wrong to malign that in any way. She hoped that Jonathan would figure out on his own that her comment had been born of the sheer magnitude of the dollars involved, not out of any doubt toward his conviction. In fact, she sensed that he did understand. Either way, there was no way to undo whatever impression she had made without sounding whiny.

They’d just reached the base of the Gulfstream’s stairway when Irene’s pager beeped again. It was Paul Boersky. “I need a phone,” she said, and she turned toward the little building that served as a terminal.

“Wait,” Jonathan said. “I have one here.” From the pocket of his rucksack, he produced a portable phone, barely larger than a checkbook. “It’s a cellular phone,” he said.

She’d heard of them, of course, and the Bureau had installed them in all of the official vehicles, but this was her first experience with a truly portable version of the technology.

“One, area code, and number,” Jonathan explained. “Just like any other telephone.”

The pace of technology was amazing, Irene thought. She dialed the number, and Boersky answered on the second ring. “What’s up?” she asked.

“I think I have something,” Boersky said. “There’s a suspected kid-toucher in Asheville, North Carolina, named Leo Ramus. There’s not enough on him to make an arrest, but the Asheville PD have reached out to us for help. Mayo was the help we provided.” He paused as Irene thought it through. “It might not be a strong link, but it’s a link. I’ve got an address for you.”

Irene told him to wait a moment while she fished a pad and a pen out of her pockets. “Okay, shoot.”

Paul gave her the address and a general description of the man. Five-eight, balding, and about thirty pounds underweight, Leo Ramus seemed to be liked by no one but loathed by many. Could there possibly be a more clichéd version of a pedophile? In Irene’s experience, most child molesters fit a certain physical profile, and Ramus’s fell smack into the eightieth percentile.

When she clicked off from Paul, she relayed the information to Jonathan and Boxers.

“Finally,” Boxers said, “something more than a compass point. There’s actually an airport in Asheville. We can be there in forty-five minutes.”

Irene had always thought that a plane like this required two pilots, but apparently, one would do. Boxers sat alone in the cockpit, while she and Jonathan sat in the opulence of the passenger area. They didn’t speak much—in fact, Jonathan appeared to sleep, though she wondered how that was possible—and as they flew, Irene wondered what these guys were really about. She’d heard, of course, about elite Special Forces units like Delta Force and SEAL Team Six—in fact her own FBI Hostage Rescue Team was constructed from their model—but she’d never spent any time with the members of such teams. The level of confidence and the level of cross-training amazed her, as did the individual men’s interest in partaking in additional risks during their leave time.

Fifteen minutes into the flight, she had to ask. “Excuse me,” she said. “Sorry to wake you.”

“I never sleep,” Scorpion said, not bothering to open his eyes. “I don’t think I’ve actually slept slept in fifteen years.”

“Why do you do this?” she asked. “You take all of these risks on your own time—and on your own dime. What’s in it for you?”

Jonathan took his time answering, beginning his response with a long, noisy sigh, but he still didn’t open his eyes. “Why do you think?”

“I have no idea.”

“Suppose I told you we did this because it was the right thing to do?”

Irene started to answer, but hesitated. “I’m sorry, but that’s too easy.”

Finally, Jonathan’s eyes opened and he leaned forward in his captain’s chair. “Sometimes, the truth is easy. You’re thinking too hard. Two weeks ago—actually, almost three weeks ago—the Unit, Uncle Sam’s finest fighting force, was dispatched to a place I’m not allowed to tell you about because the United States is officially not in that part of the world, to save the life of a congressman’s daughter who was on an ill-considered save-the-world gig. We had intel that bad guys were planning to kidnap the girl for ransom so the president dispatched us to dispatch the bad guys with the most extreme prejudice imaginable.”

“You killed them,” Irene translated.

“Yes. On direct orders from the very top. And as far as I know, the girl—her name is Tessy—never knew she was in danger.”

Irene scowled deeper. “I don’t think I’m following.”

“It was the efficiency of it all,” Jonathan explained. “We knew who the bad guys were, we knew that they were murderers, and we took them out in order to save the good guys. There were no warrants, no lawyers, no asking for permission. The order was given and the order was executed.” His eyes twinkled as a smirk grew on his face. “Tell me you wouldn’t enjoy that kind of efficiency. I sense that you want the world to be grayer than it is. Sometimes, black is just black and white is just white. Overseas, we recognize bad guys as bad guys and we take them out. Here, under rules from the same government, we make it too complicated.”

Irene opened her mouth to argue—she knew it was her responsibility to argue—but the words wouldn’t come. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d told people that if a hundred guilty people went free to preserve the civil rights of a single innocent, then the system was working. Now that her own children were in danger, the words resonated as utter bullshit, ignorant words spewed from the podium of a lecture hall and absorbed by academics who’d never known real fear, and had never experienced violence that was not prepackaged for them in a movie theater. The real world—the practical world—was far more nuanced and, yes, gray than any lawmaker could ever or would ever acknowledge.

In many regards, she realized, doing what was right and doing what was legal could be entirely different concepts.

“I get it,” she said to Jonathan. “If it isn’t about the money and it isn’t about the thrill seeking, then all that’s really left is doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Jonathan’s smile broadened. “I told you you were going to hate yourself when you got back to your FBI office.”

Irene had been to Asheville, North Carolina, twice that she could remember. The community there was an eclectic collection of starving artists and billionaire businessmen, somehow finding common ground in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The median political view made Haight-Ashbury look like Wall Street, and the consensus on everything from sex to drugs to religion ran the spectrum “fine by me” to “cool, we gotta try that.”

In this part of the world, addresses meant little because few of the roads were actually named and because so many of the homes came with wheels attached. Leo Ramus’s house, such as it was, was the worst of both. The house wasn’t actually a trailer, though it might have been—certainly it looked as if it had been patterned after one. Squat and rectangular, it sat by itself in a clearing about halfway up the steep hillside. In the dark, the woods appeared unbroken as the headlights of their borrowed Explorer swept them. On the long drive up from the main road, Irene caught sight of a half dozen mailboxes along the roadside, but each was separated by a half mile or more.

As dawn approached, the ticking clock felt like a physical weight upon her shoulders, as if each passing moment slid Ashley and Kelly deeper into jeopardy. As Boxers brought the vehicle to a halt, Irene felt compelled to dial things back a little with the guys.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “After last time, we need to take a gentler approach. We knew for certain that Jennings was a murderer, even though he turned out not to be the man who snatched my children. With Ramus, all we have is a strong suspicion—third-hand suspicion at that. I want to be a little less ... brutal in our interrogation.”

“Don’t we know that he traffics in children?” Boxers asked.

“We strongly suspect, but we don’t know. If we knew, he’d be in jail.”

Boxers chuckled and shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said.

Irene ignored him. She understood his frustration, just as she was beginning to understand the addiction to justice served Batman-style, but she couldn’t allow herself to wander too far astray of her moral compass. “I see no need for rifles,” she said. “No sense spinning him up too far too fast.”

Big Guy clearly didn’t agree.

“She’s the boss,” Jonathan said, earning him a smile from Irene.

She took that as a compliment.

“So, how do you want to handle it, Boss?” Boxers asked. His tone was far less tolerant.

“For starters,” Irene said, “Let’s actually cover the back door this time.”

“That’s for Big Guy,” Jonathan said. “He’s always been a back-door guy.”

Irene would have missed the sexual double entendre if Boxers hadn’t flipped him off as he walked around the back. There was a part of men’s brains, she decided, that simply stopped developing after sixth grade.

“We’ll knock in two minutes,” Jonathan said, checking his watch. Then he winked at Irene. “Sorry. That probably sounded like I was trying to take control.”

Irene waved the comment away. “You two seem to think each other’s thoughts. I wouldn’t dream of getting in the way of that. Is he as scary as he seems?”

Jonathan coughed out a laugh. “Oh, God, yes. He’s the smartest, most lethal human being I have ever met. And I know a lot of very smart, very lethal guys. We’ve been through a lot together.”

The way Jonathan said that last part, Irene knew that there would be no elaboration.

Just as one would imagine, the two minutes crawled by in slow motion. At one minute and sixty seconds, Jonathan nodded to Irene. “Ready when you are.” He drew his .45 and stepped to the side of the door, his back to the wall.

Her heart hammering, Irene took a deep breath, rapped hard on the hollow core door with the knuckle of her middle finger, and then moved down off the stoop into the yard and stepped a few feet to the side. As every law enforcement officer was aware, the area directly in front of a closed door was known as the cone of death. To stand there eliminated a bad guy’s need to aim before he blasted through the door.

After fifteen seconds or so, Irene nodded to Jonathan, who reached out and pounded again, never moving his back from the front wall. Of course, given the quality of construction, the wall provided him with little more protection than the hollow core door.

“Who is it?” a voice asked. It sounded both sleepy and frightened.

“Leo Ramus, it’s the police,” Irene said. In the silence of the morning, it sounded like she was shouting, but that wasn’t her intent. “We need to talk to you.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mr. Ramus, please just open the door and let us in. You are not in trouble.” That one earned her a surprised look from Jonathan.

“Do you know what time it is?” Ramus shouted. “If I’m not in trouble, what are you doing here at this hour of the morning?”

“Open the door and we’ll talk.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

Irene sighed. “Mr. Ramus, please don’t—”

“Hey!” Ramus shouted. “Who the hell are you?” There was a sound of a struggle. “Hey! Ow! You can’t do that.”

Up on the porch, Jonathan was laughing.

Five seconds later, the door opened to reveal Boxers standing in the opening, a nearly naked Ramus dangling from his forearm. “He says you can come in,” Big Guy said. To Irene’s disapproving look, he said, “The back door was unlocked, okay?”

No, it wasn’t okay, but it was done.

The neatness of Ramus’s house surprised Irene. In her mind’s eye, predators lived in hives rather than homes. She expected to find food wrappers strewn among years-old newspapers and magazines, and the stench of decaying trash. She’d expected Jennings’s place. What she found instead was a neat, well-cared-for little bungalow furnished with pieces that had been recently purchased, though no doubt from a discount chain store. His color palette ran to the browns and blacks that were typical of a bachelor pad, though he preferred rugged fabrics to leather, and a Danish modern styling that had to be rare in this part of the country.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Ramus sputtered after rebounding off the back of the sofa Boxers had shoved him onto. “You have no right to do this. You need a warrant. You need something. It’s five-thirty in the morning!”

“I always did want a talking watch,” Boxers said.

Irene nudged Big Guy out of the way. “I’ve got it from here,” she said.

Boxers took a giant step back out of the way, and then he and Jonathan busied themselves with other things as she pulled a chair closer and settled in to talk with Ramus.

“Hey, that’s my stuff!” Ramus protested as the men started rifling through his belongings. “You can’t go through that.”

Irene smacked him across the face, just hard enough to get his attention. “Focus, Leo.”

His eyes focused on her, hard and hot.

“Don’t pay any attention to them,” she said. “Focus on me. I am where your nightmare resides.”

Now that Ramus was fully awake, anger began to take the place of his fear and confusion. “I want to talk to my lawyer,” he declared.

Irene smiled. “Yeah, well, we all dream of things we can’t have.”

“You said you’re a cop. I asked for my lawyer. I don’t have to say another word to you.”

Irene nodded as she pretended to consider his words. “I understand your confusion,” she said, “but there are a couple of other conditions in play. First of all, while I am a cop, I’m not the type of cop you’re used to, and I’m damn sure not following the same cop procedures that you’re used to.”

She waited for the confusion to register. “For you,” she continued, “that’s both good news and bad news. The good news is that we’re not really after you, despite the fact that we know you’re a child molester and a kidnapper.”

Ramus turned red. “I am no such—”

“Shut up,” Irene snapped. “I want exactly one piece of information from you. Since I won’t be able to use any of what you give me in court, there’s no downside to any confession you give. You’ll have whole hours to pull your stuff together and get out before we collect any real evidence to put you away. Think of this as your opportunity for pre-arrest parole.”

Ramus’s color deepened. “I already told you that—”

“Shut up, Leo.” Irene’s words were much louder this time. “When I’m done talking, you can say anything you like. For now, I want to know where Tony Mayo is. And if you pretend not to know his name, I’ll ask my big friend here to cut your lower lip off.” She had no idea where that image came from, but it clearly had the desired effect. Ramus’s face went from red to white.

Irene drove her point home. “Which brings us to your bad news. This is not official business. There’s no record of me being here. That means we can pretty much do whatever we want to you, all without consequence.” She paused for effect. “So think your answers through carefully before offering them up. I suggest you frame them in a way that is best guaranteed to bring us face to face with Tony Mayo. Like I said before, he’s the one we want. Now it’s your turn.”

For a full fifteen seconds, Ramus just stared. His eyes didn’t move and he didn’t blink as his brain churned through his options. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Okay, I know Tony, but only as a desperate, screwed-up FBI guy. He’s talked to me a few times about stuff. But it’s not like we’re friends or anything. I have no idea where he might be. Why are you so anxious to find him?”

So this was how it was going to go. Irene leaned back in her chair, a posture designed to project patience that she didn’t have. “Leo, I’m going to throw you a bone here. If you cooperate—”

Irene sensed Jonathan’s approach from behind, so she was not startled when his hand touched her shoulder. “We found these,” he said. His voice sounded sad and she noted the fear in Ramus’s eyes as they grew huge. A piece of paper approached from around her shoulder. It looked like something from a copy machine—a memo, maybe—but there was an image on one side, a cheap, black and white copy of a photograph made by a Polaroid.

It showed two girls—her girls, Ashley and Kelly—both naked and both terrified. They clung to each other, trying their best to hide from the photographer that which the photographer no doubt wanted most to show.

A blindness fell on Irene—later, that would be her only way to describe the surge of rage that bloomed deep within. It rose like a wave from her gut to her jaw, and it continued to expand without limit. It consumed her. Devoid of intent—devoid of any conscious thought at all—Irene rose from her seat, her pistol in her hand. Ramus tried to back away, tried to run, but he was trapped on the sofa with nowhere to go. And he was far too slow.

Irene smashed the butt of her weapon into Ramus’s mouth, shattering his teeth and mangling his lips. Blood erupted in a spray from the lower half of his face, but before he could raise his hands to protect himself, Irene shoved the muzzle of her weapon through the bloody mess and pressed hard, driving the metal nib of her front sight as deeply as it would go, hopefully past his tonsils and into his throat. She prayed that it tore tissue away at every centimeter.

“Those are my daughters,” she hissed. She brought her nose within inches of his, close enough that she could feel the blood spray as he choked and struggled to breathe. “So tell me again how you want your lawyer. Pretend this gun is one of the dicks you’ll be sucking in prison, or pretend that it’s the tool that’s going to launch your cervical spine into the sofa cushion. Either way, imagine how unprepared I am to listen to anymore bullshit from you.”

Irene had never seen such terror in a man’s face, and she enjoyed the hell out of it.

“When I give you your throat back, I want one thing from you: I want to know where Tony Mayo took my daughters.” She took a little more care retracting the pistol than she had inserting it. If he couldn’t speak, he was useless.

Finally blessed with the ability to breathe again, Ramus gasped and drooled blood. “Okay,” he said. He again started to move his hands toward his face, but then he thought better of it. “Yes, I know Tony. He brought those pictures to me yesterday. I was appalled. Horrified. How could anyone—”

Irene raised her pistol for another round and he recoiled.

“No!” he begged. “Not again. Okay, I’ll tell you. But like you said before, this is not a confession. This is merely information I overheard.”

Irene’s pistol remained frozen in space, less than an inch from the trench it had plowed through his incisors.

Ramus turned his head and spat a bloody wad onto the fabric of his sofa.

“Please don’t hurt me anymore,” he said.

“You said he came to you yesterday,” Irene reminded. “What did he say and what did you say?”

Ramus hesitated. “The gist of it was that he had these girls he wanted to sell.”

Big Guy took a giant step closer. “And he knew that that’s the business you’re in. Selling little girls.”

Ramus seemed to sense the room’s desire to tear him apart. He drew his knees to his chest. “You asked!” he shouted. “You can’t ask me and then hurt me for the answer.”

Irene paused, stunned. Did she really just hear a plea for justice from a man who sold children into slavery? Was there no end to the degree that the world could tilt from its intended axis?

Yet, the words resonated. She did in fact insist on honesty, and she needed to steel herself for what the honesty brought.

“It’s not me,” Ramus said. “I know a guy. When Tony told me that he had those girls for sale—honest to God, I think that this stuff is disgusting—”

“So you gave him the name,” Irene interrupted. She wanted to cut through the lies.

“Well, yeah. And I might have mentioned that there was a shipment going out this morning.” He checked his watch. “Soon.”

Irene didn’t know how to channel her rage. She didn’t know how she could ever justify to herself or anyone else the tiny speck of bloody tissue that clung to the front sight of her SIG. She had violated this man just as surely as if she had raped him, and now she wanted to execute him.

“Tell me the rest,” she said. “All of it. The when and the where.”

Ramus hesitated and not unreasonably. He seemed to understand that his future had collapsed into this very small slice of time that was defined by his next words. “I tell you this and you let me go, right?” His voice was beginning to sound hoarse as the swelling progressed. “You promised that you’d let me go. That at least you’d give me a head start.”

Irene’s jaw locked.

“That’s what you said,” he repeated. “You said you weren’t after me. You wanted Mayo. That’s what you said.”

In her periphery, Irene saw Big Guy take a threatening step forward, and she raised her hand in rebuke. That was, indeed, the promise she’d made. “Finish your thought,” she said. “Where and when?”

Ramus focused his eyes on a spot somewhere on the floor beyond Irene. Could that be shame she saw? Was that even possible?

“This morning.” He looked at the clock that sat atop his artificial mantel. “Soon. Before seven. There’s a U-Lokit Storage place near the entrance to I-81, about ten, twelve miles from here. That’s where he was going to take them.”

“Why?” Irene asked. “What is at the storage place? And why is the time important?”

Ramus’s shoulder sagged. “There’ll be a truck. A shipment. Your girls will be part of the shipment.”

Shipment. The word seemed so cold, so awful. Human cargo. Human beings—children—reduced to chattel. Irene looked to the rest of her team. Jonathan seemed to be locked in a place of deep sympathy and Boxers was red with rage.

She rose from her chair. “Thank you,” she said. “And a deal’s a deal. Now’s the time for you to start running like hell.”

Chapter 9

The U-Lokit storage yard sat closer to the city—if, indeed, it was reasonable even to call this little burg a city. People who thought of the artsy parts of Asheville, or of the wealth that surrounded the Biltmore Estate, would never dream that a neighborhood such as this even existed. Scroungy and overgrown it was a place of mid-rise commercial buildings that may have thrived in the sixties or seventies, but had not witnessed anything close to prosperity in the recent past.

The storage yard itself was mostly hidden by what might have once been a small textile mill in which little glass remained in the arched windows of the brick façade. A barely paved road wrapped around the building, and but for the tiny sign that appeared to be temporarily attached by two nails to a telephone pole, there would have been no sign at all. This was the perfect setup for the drug trade, or for vehicle chop shops. It was far enough off the beaten path not to be accidentally stumbled upon by concerned citizens, and police officers on patrol were also unlikely to cruise by here.

As Boxers pulled the turn, he seemed to understand the importance of the timing. Ramus could not have been more specific. Be there by seven o’clock, or miss the transfer, pure and simple. Irene sat at the front edge of the backseat on the passenger side, her MP5 slung and ready to go. The sun was well above the horizon now, so visibility would no longer be an issue, but that was a condition that cut both ways. As they would be able to see the bad guys, so would the bad guys be able to see them.

This was all such new territory for Irene. Her shooting encounters in the past had always been as part of the Hostage Rescue Team, and as such, she was never a first responder. In fact, in general, the FBI was rarely the first to encounter bad guys, and certainly not in an uncontrolled environment. If they crashed a door, it was because they’d planned a raid carefully, and with such overkill that the odds were impossibly stacked against the bad guys. If HRT made a move, it was usually after local police had exhausted their own capabilities, which by definition meant that the physical and emotional terrain were well known by the time they arrived on the scene. That built-in delay and preparation time explained in part why the total number of FBI agents killed in the history of the Bureau numbered less than half the number of local police officers who were killed in any given year.

Now, as she found herself charging head-first into the unknown, with the only fixed variable being the fact that kidnappers and killers were on the other end of the journey, her normal tricks for settling her mind and concentrating on the vital elements of the operation were no longer useful. Without them to concentrate on, only fear remained, and fear was never a useful emotion when the only chance for success lay in outright aggression.

“Hey, look up ahead,” Boxers said, pointing over the steering wheel and past the windshield. “We’ve got a car approaching.”

“According to the map, he’s got to be coming from the storage place,” Jonathan said. “There’s nothing else at the start of this yard.”

Irene scooted forward until her knees were on the floor and her head was level with theirs. It was a nondescript beige sedan—a Ford Taurus, maybe—and the road was too narrow to allow the vehicle to pass their van.

“Stay to the center and slow down,” Jonathan commanded. “Make him stop.”

Only the other driver had no intention of stopping. He pulled the Taurus hard to his right and over the curb to continue on his way. As they closed the distance that separated them, Irene’s heart jumped. She recognized the driver. “That’s him,” she said, pointing. “That’s Tony Mayo.”

Boxers hit the brakes hard.

“No!” Irene shouted. “Let him go. If he’s leaving, it’s because he’s dropped the girls off.”

“Or it could mean that it didn’t work out and he’s got them with him,” Jonathan countered. “If he recognized you—and judging from the way he was driving, I think that’s a good possibility—they could be in even more danger than before.”

“No,” Irene said again. “He dropped them off. I’m sure of it.” She was of course sure of no such thing, but she couldn’t imagine the alternative.

“You’re just going to let that asshole go?” Boxers said. Clearly, it was an unthinkable option.

“It’s not about him,” Irene said. “This is about Ashley and Kelly. Everything else is secondary.”

He started accelerating again, but only after he emitted what sounded like an extended growl.

Jonathan turned and winked at her. “Good decision,” he said.

“Get ready,” Boxers announced as they cleared another curve. Directly ahead stood the entrance to the U-Lokit yard, its metal gate propped open, the chain designed to keep it shut dangling limp, with the big padlock still attached. Just past the opening, the road split into a Y.

“Park it here,” Irene said as Jonathan was taking a breath to speak. “If the worst happens, at least they won’t be able to drive out without a lot of work.”

Jonathan smiled. “I was going to say that very thing.”

“Get a room,” Boxers grumped as he threw the transmission into park and opened his door.

Ten seconds later, the three of them were reunited at the front of the van, each of them armed for war.

“Two directions, three people,” Boxers said. “What do you want to do, Boss?” He directed the question to Jonathan.

“Is your Spidey-sense tingling?” Jonathan asked. “Where do you think they are?”

Boxers pointed to the branch on the left. “Down there,” he said.

“Then that’s yours,” Jonathan proclaimed. “Wolverine and I will go right.”

“Oh, sure,” Boxers said. “You always get the girl.”

“I’m not a girl,” Irene protested, and the instant the words left her mouth, she cringed. As if any of this had anything to do with any of that. “Both of you go left. I’ll go right.”

“Actually,” Jonathan said, “Big Guy is the original chauvinist, and I will be with you on the right while he covers the left on his own.”

Irene inhaled to argue, but Jonathan raised his hand to cut her off.

“You can argue and waste time,” he said, “or you can just agree. The result will be the same either way.”

No one spoke to Irene that way, yet here he was doing exactly that. Rather than respond, she started walking down the right-hand branch of the roadway. While she made a point of not looking, she was pleased to hear Jonathan’s footsteps behind her. She imagined that Boxers could handle himself, irrespective of what came his way. Hell, when you were as big as he, she imagined that you were pretty much bulletproof for anything that wasn’t launched from an airplane.

Irene led with her rifle. She kept it pressed to her shoulder, her finger just outside of the trigger guard. If anyone posed a threat, she was prepared to send them to the Great Beyond at two thousand three hundred feet per second. With thirty rounds in her magazine, that was a lot of Great Beyonds to be dispatched, and under the right circumstances, she’d be delighted to sign her name to every one of them.

Two hundred steps into her journey, while cloaked in the shadow of the first building, she saw a truck and she drew to a stop so quickly that Jonathan bumped into her. It was a big box truck, something appropriate to a moving and storage company, and a man stood on either side of it, each of them sporting a Tec-9 in plain view. Scary-looking in the way that a wasp looks deadly, she recognized the gun as a gang weapon that had all of the accuracy of a nineteenth-century musket, but at a thousand times the cycling rate. Irene saw that as a check mark in her column on the advantage chart.

“We’re in this deep,” Jonathan said. “It’s too late to just watch.”

“You take the one on the left,” Irene said.

“I was just going to say that, too,” Jonathan replied with a grin. “Are we arresting or shooting?”

“We’ll let them decide.” Irene led the way into the low-angled bright sunlight, her rifle pressed against her shoulder, the front sight covering her target’s center of mass. He could have been anybody, a middle-aged white guy in casual clothes that blended in with anyone, anywhere.

“Federal agent!” Irene shouted. “Don’t move!”

Her guy then did exactly the wrong thing. Not only did he move, but his movement brought the muzzle of his weapon up and toward her. She shot him twice in the chest and he dropped like a sack. Three more gunshots on her left told her without looking that Jonathan had dispatched the other one as well.

Irene picked up the pace. The dead guys were only guards, maybe one a driver. That meant that there were others, who now knew that a gun battle was underway. With surprise no longer a factor, all she had left was speed. She started to run. As she vaulted over the body of the man she’d killed, she heard a rumbling sound, and she instantly knew what it was. The trailer’s rolling overhead door was coming down. She dug deeper for even more speed.

She slid to a stop on the back side of the truck just a second or two before Jonathan, and she saw a man’s legs on the far side of the door, disappearing from the top down as the panel slid shut.

“Don’t!” Irene shouted. “Don’t move! Federal—”

Before she could finish, Jonathan fired five shots through the door. There was a thump, and then the door drifted open just enough to reveal a dead man sprawled facedown on the wooden floor.

Irene looked to Jonathan, who gave a halfhearted shrug. “I figured we were shooting, not arresting,” he said. “I got confused.”

It was unquestionably the right move. If the guy had holed himself up in the vehicle, that would have complicated things beyond measure. Still, closing a door didn’t pose a threat, so how could she justify the use of deadly—

As the door drifted up farther, with a little help from Jonathan, the growing seam of light revealed a dozen or so children, mostly girls and all under the age of nine or ten. They sat huddled in a clump toward the front wall of the cargo bay, their clothes tattered, and some in no clothes at all. The space reeked of filth.

Irene found her hand at her mouth, suddenly unable to breathe. Her vision clouded with tears. What kind of monsters—

“Who said you could shoot the place up without me?” Boxers’ voice boomed as he appeared from around the corner. “I’ve told you before—” He stopped abruptly. “Ah, damn,” he said, and an instant later, he was inside, among the children. “Don’t you worry, little ones,” he said in a tone so soft that it surprised Irene. “You’re safe now. The bad men can’t hurt you anymore.”

Seeing Big Guy spring into action like that broke a kind of spell that had frozen Irene in place. As horrifying a sight as it was, this was no time for her to freeze up. “Ashley?” she called. “Kelly?”

None of the children answered up. None of them said anything.

Irene pressed her hands against the floor and hoisted herself up into the cargo bay. She tried not to look into the body’s eyes. Good guy or bad, dead was dead, and dead was always unnerving. Boxers had produced a small flashlight from somewhere, and as he passed it over all those pitiful, terrified faces, none of them looked familiar to Irene.

Where were they? Where were her little girls? Had Mayo in fact changed his mind and driven off with Ashley and Kelly in the back of his Taurus? Had he seen these pitiful faces himself and determined that he couldn’t go through with it? Perhaps his breed of monster came with his soul still intact. And if that were the case, then she’d just let him escape.

How could she know? The only people who could possibly answer her were all dead. Suddenly, all of this seemed stupid and shortsighted.

“None of them?” Jonathan asked.

His words broke her emotional spell yet again. She shook her head no because she couldn’t trust her voice. Good God, what had she done?

She spun around and darted back to the opening. “Ashley!” she yelled. “Kelly!”

“Maybe we can chase down the car,” Jonathan offered.

“And what of all these children?” Irene snapped. “We can’t just leave—”

A noise in the distance shut her up. “Did you hear that?”

She leaned out farther and cocked her head. There it was again. A pounding sound. It was coming from somewhere down the row of storage lockers. Someone was pounding on a door.

Irene bolted out of the opening and hit the ground at a run. “Ashley? Kelly?”

The pounding got louder, more aggressive. She heard voices, too. Children’s voices by the timbre and quality, but too muffled to make out the words.

“I’m coming!” Irene yelled. “Keep pounding, I’m coming!” She turned to call to Jonathan, but he was right with her, just a step behind.

The storage units were all identical, each constructed of brick and accessible through wide double doors that appeared to be made of steel, each of which was locked shut with a padlock. As the pounding continued, it also got closer, and when Irene was only three doors away from Unit 1404, she could see the door moving from the pressure of whoever was behind it.

The padlock on the outside was nothing special, a combination job that you could pick up at any hardware store. Still, it was a lock and it was closed.

When Irene arrived at the door, she pounded on her side. “Ashley? Kelly, are you in there?”

Jonathan’s hand gripped her shoulder. “Step out of the way,” he said. “I’ll take care of the lock.” As he stepped around her, he lifted his Mossberg shotgun from where it dangled under his armpit and racked the slide to eject a loaded round, and then he slid a breaching slug from the ammo loop on the side of the weapon, pressed it into the receiver, and snapped the slide release shut.

“Step away from the door!” Irene yelled to the occupants trapped inside.

Jonathan pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against the shank of the padlock and pulled the trigger. The muzzle barked and the lock fragmented. Jonathan opened the door.

A sickening stench poured out in a rancid wave, and it was followed immediately by a flood of five or six children, again mostly girls, but these were all a little older, maybe twelve. They all appeared desperately frightened and desperately filthy, and none of them were Ashley or Kelly.

A flashlight snapped on behind her, and over her left shoulder, Jonathan played the beam of a mini Maglite into the darkness of the space. They gasped in unison. The space was packed. An area of fifteen by twenty feet held upwards of another ten or twelve children. There appeared to be remnants of food on the floor, and the place buzzed with flies. Like the children in the van, the faces just stared back at them, into the light. They didn’t know what to do.

“Hello,” Irene said. “Don’t be frightened. No one will hurt you anymore.”

“Mom?”

The tiny voice came from somewhere on her left, and as Irene pivoted, Jonathan shifted the light to keep up.

And there they were. Her two girls. They looked healthier and cleaner than the others, but they looked equally terrified. They squinted and shielded their eyes from the bright light.

“Oh, my God,” Irene breathed. “You’re safe.” She dropped to one knee.

Reacting to the voice they recognized, the girls moved as one, darting away from the wall and into her open arms.

“Mommy, I’m so sorry,” Kelly said past her tears.

“No, no, no,” Irene soothed. “Don’t be sorry. You have no need to be sorry.”

“He said he worked for you,” Ashley said. “I never would have gotten into his car.”

Irene hugged them both, inhaled them both. “He is a bad, bad man,” she explained. “But you don’t ever have to worry about him again.”

“Um, excuse me,” Jonathan said.

Irene looked up.

“Big Guy and I have to go,” Jonathan said. “These kids need ambulances, and you need to talk to the cops. We can’t be here for any of that.”

Irene started to stand, but her daughters wouldn’t let her. Of course they had to go, and then she would have a lot of explaining to do. “I understand,” she said. “Look, I don’t know what . . . I don’t know how . . .” The words just wouldn’t form.

“Our pleasure,” Jonathan said. He kissed his fingers and touched them gently to the tops of the girls’ heads. When he placed the fingers on Irene’s head, they lingered just for a second or two. “Congratulations,” he said.

And then he was gone.

Chapter 10

Asheville Police Detective Bob Anderson had become Irene’s shadow. He gave her space for a few days while she sat with the girls in the hospital, but now that they were getting better and were slated to go home the next day, he started to turn the screws on Irene.

He finally coaxed her to the hospital’s coffee shop, but only after a floor nurse promised to page her when either daughter awoke.

Irene drank her coffee black, while Anderson turned his to coffee syrup with a fistful of sugar packets. With eating habits like that, she wondered how he stayed so slim. They sat opposite each other, at a table set for four.

“We still haven’t been able to find your friend Mayo,” Anderson said. Clearly, it was an icebreaker because it made no sense to open their chat with things he didn’t know. With a failure.

“He was never a friend of mine,” Irene said. In the explanation she’d shared at the crime scene, and then again in the snippets of interviews over the past couple of days, Irene had pretty much come clean with all the details, starting with her interview with Amanda. She’d omitted the presence of Scorpion and Big Guy, and, of course, any mention of the episode with Jennings.

“No idea where he might have gone?”

“If I knew where he was, I’d be making travel plans to oversee his arrest.” Irene kept her answers short and her tone tight. She sensed that Anderson had a bomb to drop, and she was confident that he’d get to it soon.

“Let me tell you what’s not adding up for me,” Anderson said. “I don’t get how you arrived at the U-Lokit yard without a vehicle.”

“I had a vehicle at first,” Irene said. “But someone must have stolen it. One of the traffickers, I imagine.”

The answer seemed to amuse him. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I guess child traffickers can never have enough vehicles.” He took a sip. “You know, you saved a lot of lives out there. Every one of those kids is going to be fine. Physically, anyway. Emotionally, well, there’s some serious shrink bills in a lot of futures.”

Irene felt a stab, and Anderson seemed to realize it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That came out way more harshly than I wanted. I’m sure your girls will be fine.”

Irene just nodded. What was there to say? “Have you been able to find the children’s parents?” she asked.

“Working on it. We’ve found some. The preponderance are foster kids. Hard to believe anyone is so evil as to take kids with hard knocks and then knock them even harder.”

More nodding. The trick in an interrogation—and that was what this was—was to get people talking about anything. Just get the flow going. Once you do, there’s always time to bring the topic around to the one you’re fishing for. By remaining largely silent, Irene was keeping the valves shut.

“Funny thing about those kids,” Anderson went on. “Some of them talk about soldiers being with you. A couple even talked about a giant.”

Irene smiled. “Kids say the darnedest things, don’t they?”

“They do. Yes, they do. And it’s interesting, too, that according to the medical examiner, one of the traffickers was killed with a weapon that doesn’t match any of the ones you were carrying.”

Something fluttered in Irene’s gut. This could be trouble.

She leaned forward. “Let’s cut to the chase, Detective,” she said. “All these questions and suspicions. Is it your intent to arrest me?”

The inquiry seemed to startle him. “On what charge?”

“That was my next question.”

He scowled as he considered his answer. “I’ll be honest with you, Agent Rivers. There’s a lot about what you’ve told me that just doesn’t make sense. Beyond the bullshit about the car and the weapons, there are way too many missing dots when I try to connect them.”

He paused, and she waited.

Anderson sighed and vigorously scratched the sides of his head with both hands. “On the other hand, there are all those lives saved, and of the ones who were killed, I figure the world can use the extra oxygen.”

Irene felt the bloom of hope, but she continued her silence, not wanting to screw anything up.

He smiled. “Oh, relax,” he said. “I just decided that I don’t care. Whatever rules you bent and broke, I don’t see any of the harmed parties pressing charges. I’ve got real criminals to chase.”

Irene wondered if she might float out of her chair. She hadn’t realized the weight of that burden.

Anderson stood. “Try to keep a low profile for a while, will you?” he said. He offered his hand.

She stood and accepted it. “Nice meeting you,” she said.

He laughed. “Yeah, right. We both know that this is a freebie, right? And before you lock up, I don’t expect an answer. I wish you a wonderful future with those beautiful little girls of yours.”

She remained standing as he took three steps toward the exit, and then turned. “Oh, one more thing,” he said. “I just heard this morning that that Ramus prick is dead.”

Irene couldn’t suppress her smile.

“Thanks to your lead, we got a BOLO out on the wire, and they picked him up somewhere in Kentucky. I hear the cops there were a little vocal about the charges against him, and somehow he beat himself to death in his jail cell.” He winked. “Go figure.”

“Yeah,” Irene said. “Go figure.”

Anderson resumed his walk toward the door and said over his shoulder, “We won’t give up on Mayo.”

Irene waited till he was gone, then rose from her chair and started the long walk back to her babies’ rooms, both looking forward to and dreading tomorrow, when they would be home again, just the three of them. They’d just endured a part of the world that she’d always prayed they’d be spared. How could she make it better? What could she say even to get a running start on the subject? Here, in the hospital, as depressing a place as it was, at least there was the pressure of something more imminently important than tackling the difficult conversations. There were the health scares of disease exposures—the kids in that storage locker shared enough germs to choke every petri dish in the building—and the physical exams, and thank heaven and all things holy that Ashley and Kelly were fine in both regards. The malnutrition and dehydration issues were already stabilized, so that was good, too. Nothing but good news all around.

If only she could tell them that the perpetrator of all this, Tony Mayo, was in custody. Or better still, dead. She wanted to assure her children that they would never have to worry about him again. As it was, there would be yet another bitter lesson on the rarity of happy endings in real life.

Irene felt her mood darkening as she walked down the final hallway that led to Ashley and Kelly’s room, but it brightened the moment she walked through the doorway. Dom D’Angelo, looking dapper and priestly in his black suit and clerical collar, sat quietly in a chair near the window, reading a novel whose title she couldn’t make out. He beamed when he saw her, and stood to greet her.

“They’re sleeping soundly,” he whispered. He cast a glance to both of them as he grasped Irene’s hands. “Children are so beautiful when they sleep.” He made eye contact with Irene and motioned to the door with his forehead. “Let’s walk,” he said. He bent to pick up a slim leather briefcase.

Back in the hallway, they could speak more or less at full volume. “It’s so nice of you to come by,” Irene said. “I was just thinking of the mental anguish that lies ahead for both of them.”

“Let’s walk and talk outside,” Dom said. “Things always seem more dire in a hospital. It’s a beautiful day.”

It was a five-minute walk, and despite several attempts to ignite a little small talk, Dom seemed intent on waiting for the sunshine. As they stepped out into the eighty-degree brightness, Irene realized that he’d made a good call. The air smelled like summer, filled with the aroma of moist grass and blooming flowers. The air carried no sounds of crying or of doctors being paged.

“Your girls will be fine in time,” Dom said as he led the way out onto the sidewalk that led to a patch of grass and some benches. He held Irene’s hand as they walked. “They are not sick and they were not brutalized. Considering some of the other children I deal with, that’s a great first step. Plus, I’ll be there to help you if you want.”

Irene made an incredulous puffing sound. “Of course I want.”

The path turned sharply uphill. “You’re the one I worry about,” Dom said.

“Me?”

“You. A little bird told me that you did a hell of a job getting Ashley and Kelly back. He said you never lost focus.”

Irene slipped her hand out of his and used it to wave the comment away as irrelevant. “I was just doing my job. As an FBI agent and a mom.”

Dom let the comment hang and pointed to one of the benches. “I don’t disagree,” he said, taking a seat on the far end. “But it sounds like you might have crossed a few internal lines. If you ever need to discuss that—or anything else, for that matter—I want you to know that I’m here for you, too.”

Irene remained standing. “I never doubted that for a moment.”

Dom cocked his head. “You’re not going to sit?”

Irene tossed her head toward the hospital. “I’ve been out of their room for too long,” she said. “I don’t want them to wake up and find me not there.”

“I understand.” He stood. “You’re a good mom, Irene.”

Something about the way he delivered the words caused tears to press behind her eyes.

“But listen,” he said. “I have something here for you. Something you need to watch in private as soon as you can.” He reached into his briefcase and withdrew a wrapped rectangle that was the size of a book. “Do you have a VHS player?”

“At home, I do. What is it?”

He handed it to her. “You’ll know when you see it. Watch it alone, though.”

She hesitated. “Please tell me that you haven’t gone into the pornography business,” she joked.

His eyes darkened. “Call me after you watch it if you need to. Anytime, day or night.”

Irene fought the sudden urge to hand it back. “Dom?”

“It speaks for itself,” he said. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go see if the girls are awake yet.”

It was nearly thirty hours later when Irene settled into her chair in the family room and slid the VHS tape into the player. Thankfully, the girls were exhausted after the seven-hour drive and were anxious to go to bed as soon as dinner was finished. So far, they seemed happy, essentially undamaged from their ordeal. Irene had been anticipating hours of soul-searching discussion, but now was rather unnerved by the lack of it. If neither of the girls brought it up, was Irene just supposed to ignore it?

God, how she hated Tony Mayo and all the misery he brought upon her family.

Once the tape worked through its initial jumps and wiggles, the image settled down to a somewhat jiggly picture of a one-level strip-style motel, a covered sidewalk in front of a uniform pattern of flat rectangular windows alternating with flat paneled doors. A wide array of cars was nosed up to the sidewalk, one of them a Chrysler LeBaron. Judging from the framing of the picture, that was the focus of this production. There was no sound.

After a few seconds, the door to the room in front of the LeBaron opened to reveal a man in his late twenties, early thirties, leaving with a thick garment bag slung over his shoulder. Irene’s heart jumped when he saw the face.

Tony Mayo.

The camera jiggled a little more as the lens zoomed in. Now it was just Mayo in the frame. Someone had been surveilling him! This was exactly the moment she’d been praying for. If the camera could just reveal—

The frame jumped almost imperceptibly, and two seconds later, Tony’s body disintegrated in a spray of blood and bone. One arm, still attached to his shoulder, pinwheeled out of the frame completely. Irene yelled—at least she thought it was a yell—and brought her hands to her mouth to stifle it.

Then, as she continued to watch the horror show, the zoom lens pulled back. And back. And back some more. As the frame increased, she saw the entire parking lot, and in front of that, the entire lot of a waffle place adjacent to the motel. Then she saw four lanes of Interstate traffic and then the tops of trees on the near side of the highway.

She realized then that she was watching the image from a spotter’s scope, and that she’d witnessed a sniper shot from a huge weapon—she suspected it to be a .50 caliber. The range had to be three quarters of a mile, maybe more. It was the kind of shot that only a precious few people had a hope in hell of making.

She considered it an honor to know two of them.

Thank you for reading Soft Targets. Fans of John Gilstrap’s

Jonathan Grave thrillers have probably recognized it as a

prequel to the Grave series. In case you missed the first full-

length Jonathan Grave novel, here is an excerpt from . . .

NO MERCY

Available in print and e-book formats from

Kensington Publishing Corp.

Chapter 1

The fullness of the moon made it all more complicated. The intense silver glow cast shadows as defined as midday despite the thin veil of cloud cover. Dressed entirely in black, with only his eyes showing beneath his hood, Jonathan Grave moved like a shadow in the stillness. Crickets and tree frogs, nocturnal noisemakers by the thousands, gave him some cover, but not enough. There was never enough cover. He reminded himself that he was in Indiana soybean country facing a clueless adversary, but then he remembered the penalty for failing to respect one’s adversary.

The Patrone brothers had been arguing for every one of the twenty minutes that Jonathan had been monitoring them. The bud in his left ear picked up every word, beamed to him from the tiny wireless transmitter he’d stuck to the lowest pane of the front window. From what he’d been able to determine from his hasty research in the past few hours, the Patrones were nobodies—just a pair of losers from West Virginia whose motives for this kidnapping adventure were unclear, and from Jonathan’s perspective, irrelevant.

The stress of the kidnappers’ ordeal had clearly begun to take its toll. They’d counted on Thomas Hughes’s parents coughing up the ransom quickly, and now they couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong.

“I’m tired of being jerked off by that asshole,” Lionel said. The older of the two, he was the hothead. “Old Stevie Hughes needs more proof, maybe we should just cut off a piece of Tommy and send it to his old man in an envelope.”

Jonathan picked up his pace, kneeling in the dew-wet grass to un-sling his black rucksack and open the flap. With his night vision gear in place, the darkness burned like green daylight.

“You’re not serious,” said Little Brother Barry. His tone carried an unstated plea. He was the pacifist. Jonathan liked pacifists. They lived longer.

“Watch me.”

Lionel continued to rant as Jonathan produced a coil of detonating cord from his pack and slid a K-Bar knife from its scabbard on his left shoulder. He measured out about an inch of cord, sliced it off the roll, and slid the knife back home. With a loop of black electrician’s tape, he attached the det cord to the cable that brought electrical service to the house, then slid the initiator into place. Det cord was the best stuff in the world. A woeful bit of overkill in this case, but unquestionably effective.

“Chris said to wait,” Barry said to his brother.

Jonathan pressed the transmit button in the center of his Kevlar vest and whispered, “Boss’s name is Chris.” It was the missing bit of data from three days of gathering intel.

A familiar voice crackled in his ear, “Copy that. Any sign of him yet?”

“I was going to ask you,” Jonathan whispered. “I’ve only got two friends here.” They knew from an eyewitness to Thomas Hughes’s kidnapping that three hooded figures had carried the naked Ball State student out of his apartment in the middle of the night. Jonathan didn’t like the fact that one member of the team remained unaccounted for.

The tone and pace of the kidnappers’ argument told him that their frustration level had passed the tipping point into desperation. He moved faster.

“This whole thing is hopelessly messed up,” Lionel said. “Maybe Chris got picked up by the cops.”

“Maybe you’re just paranoid,” Barry soothed.

“This was supposed to be easy money. My ass.”

Jonathan was at the back of the house now—the black side, as he thought of it—and it was time to prepare the doors for entry. The Patrones had stashed Thomas Hughes in the basement. In this part of the country, it was probably called a storm cellar. Or maybe a root cellar. Constructed entirely of stone, from the outside it could be accessed through two heavy wooden doors that sloped at a shallow angle from ground level. When the time came, those doors would be Jonathan’s point of entry.

Pulling his cell phone from its pouch on his vest, Jonathan flipped open the cover and viewed the image transmitted by the spaghetti-size fiber optic camera he’d inserted between the doors. In the light cast by the single dim lightbulb inside, he had difficulty making out any real detail, but he saw what he needed. Their precious cargo hadn’t moved in the last half hour. The fourth-year music major lay naked on the basement floor, his arms, legs, and mouth bound with duct tape.

“Hang on a little longer,” Jonathan whispered. The kid had no idea that he was moments away from rescue. For all he knew, this was all he’d ever see again. Even after he was safe, there’d be no way to erase the trauma of these past four days. Whoever Thomas Hughes had been before the kidnapping would be forever changed. It would be years before he’d feel real joy again, and chances were, he’d never rediscover the trust he once felt toward others.

The speaker bud in his right ear—the one not occupied by the Patrones—crackled again. “Sit rep, please.” Apparently two minutes had passed since they’d last spoken, and Jonathan’s airborne partner, Brian Van de Meulebroeke—“Boxers”— wanted a situation report, per their standard operating procedure. They spoke on encrypted radio channels without worry of casual eavesdroppers.

“I’m preparing for breach now,” Jonathan said.

Still using night vision, he removed three GPCs—general purpose charges—from his rucksack, one for each of the door hinges on the right-hand side, and a third for the heavy-duty padlock in the middle. Constructed of C4 explosive with a tail of det cord to ensure proper activation, GPCs were as malleable as modeling clay, infinitely reliable, and effective as hell. The phrase “shock and awe” would take on a whole new meaning when the blast waves were focused on a room as small as the cellar.

Lionel said, “Let’s cut off the kid’s balls.”

Jonathan felt his stomach drop.

“What?” At least Barry was horrified. That was a good sign.

“You heard me. We’ll cut off his balls and send them to his father for jerking us around.”

“That’s sick,” Barry said.

“What’s sick about it? He’s gonna die anyway.”

“Don’t say that.”

Jonathan pressed his transmit button again. “See our friend Chris yet? Looks like I’m going to have to pull the trigger on this thing.”

In his ear: “Sorry, boss, I got nothing. Nearest headlight is two miles away and heading in the other direction.”

“I copy,” Jonathan said. Just calm down in there.

Lionel was explaining the way of the world to his little brother. “You seriously thought we were keeping him alive? Why would we do that?”

“Because they paid the ransom.”

Lionel laughed. “That’s why Grandma always loved you best. You were always the sweet naïve one.”

With the breaching charges in place, timed to fire five hundred milliseconds apart, Jonathan took a few steps back from the doors and glanced again at the image on his phone. Thomas Hughes had shifted from his stomach onto his side, his knees still drawn up, just as they’d been in all the photos they’d sent. Jonathan scowled. If the kid hadn’t had a chance to stretch in four days, he wasn’t going to be much of a runner when the time came to move.

“Don’t you get it, little brother?” Lionel went on. Jonathan could hear the sick smile. “Kidnapping gets you thrown in jail forever. Add murder and you get forever plus a couple of years. It doesn’t matter. I’m not taking the chance that Mr. Rich Kid is gonna testify against me. We get the money, we kill him, bury the body, and disappear.”

“Nobody said anything about killing!” Barry protested.

“Because no one thought you were an idiot.”

“So what’s all this bullshit with the photos and everything been about?”

Lionel laughed long and hard. “Just what you said. Bullshit. The family was suspecting we were gonna kill him, so they kept insisting on a new, more recent picture. That meant we had to keep him alive until the money was in our hands. Get it?”

Jonathan winced. He himself had devised the ruse of demanding photographs—a proven tactic to buy time to figure out where Thomas was. He decided to move back around to the front of the house to see if he could get a peek through the windows and a better handle on their emotions.

“Hey, you know what?” Lionel said. His voice had dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “We might be on our way to jail anyway. Maybe Chris went straight to the cops and told them everything. I bet they’re outside right now.” There were footsteps in Jonathan’s ear, then ahead and to the left, the front door flew open and Lionel stepped out onto the front porch.

“Shit,” Jonathan hissed. He was frozen in plain sight, but concealed by the house’s moon shadow. If he didn’t move, maybe he’d stay invisible. Certainly, this was not the time to duck for cover. His hand moved to raise his battle-slung M4 assault rifle to his shoulder. He had no desire to take his adversary here, but he wasn’t going to get shot, either.

“Are you out here, assholes?” Lionel shouted. He held a pistol in his hand. “Why don’t you come and get me?” He fired two shots into the night. To Jonathan’s ear, they were .38s.

Barry’s voice hissed in an urgent, whispered shout, “What the hell are you doing? The whole county will hear.”

“What do I care?”

Jonathan could see them both now, out on the porch, and he wondered if Barry might become Lionel’s first victim. Calculating the distance and correcting for the breeze, Jonathan slipped a gloved finger into the trigger guard and waited.

“I’m done with this shit,” Lionel shouted. “I’m fucking done with it.”

“We’re almost home,” Barry soothed. “We’ve come this far. We don’t want to screw it up by—”

“Don’t you get it? There’s nothing left to screw up. We’ve been abandoned, little brother.”

“You don’t know that. Negotiations just aren’t going as good as they were supposed to.”

“You don’t know that.” Lionel was aching for a fight, and he’d take it however he could get it. The two brothers stood there, staring at each other. Finally, Lionel nodded. “Okay,” he said.

Jonathan watched the tension drain from Barry’s shoulders.

“You’re right, Barry. It’s just the negotiations.” Lionel stepped back inside. Just from the length of his first stride, Jonathan knew that more was coming. “So, let’s do something to speed them along.” More footsteps.

Barry hurried after him. “What are you doing?” Panic had returned to his voice.

“What I should’ve done a long time ago,” Lionel said.

“Shit. What are you doing with those?”

“Just what you think I am.”

Jonathan cursed under his breath. His equipment didn’t have the capability to monitor two images at once, and now he wished he’d opted to slip the camera into the top floor instead of the basement.

“We can’t do that,” Barry begged. “Not yet. We can’t.”

“Watch me,” Lionel growled. “You just hold him down.”

Jonathan dashed back to the cellar doors. This whole thing was coming unzipped. As the Patrone brothers moved away from the microphone, their conversation became muddled and difficult to understand. But he could see them both as they paraded down the interior stone steps. They looked remarkably like their driver’s license photographs. He pressed his transmit button. “I think it’s going hot,” he whispered.

“Roger that, boss. I’ll move in closer, but stay airborne till you advise.”

Jonathan didn’t bother to respond. Things were happening too fast now.

In the cellar, Lionel led the way, with Barry close behind. “We’re not supposed to do anything till Chris comes back.” He seemed to think that repeating the same sentiment could change the future.

“Fuck Chris,” Lionel spat. “Spread his legs and hold him down.”

Thomas Hughes bucked wildly on the floor, a futile effort to get away, to do something. Lionel fired a brutal kick into the boy’s side, but Thomas only doubled the intensity of his struggle. In his hands, Lionel held a pair of long-handled pruning shears, the kind you use to cut through inch-thick tree limbs.

It was time.

Jonathan let the rifle fall against its sling, drew his .45, and pressed against the wall.

“Relax,” Lionel said with a laugh. “This is only gonna hurt like a mother—”

Plugging his right ear to protect it from the concussion that was on its way, Jonathan punched a three-digit code into his cell and pressed Send.

Jonathan registered the explosions as four separate blasts, but inside it sounded like the end of the world. The first explosion severed the electrical service; the next three blew the right-hand door panel off its hinges. It fell inward, flat against the interior stairs, forming a kind of sliding board, which Jonathan utilized to skid into the room.

“Freeze!” he yelled. “Don’t move or I’ll kill you!” Victim and captors were blind in the darkness, but Jonathan could see every detail in the green hue that he’d come to think of as nighttime. The Colt 1911 was an old friend in his hand, the grip settling into his leather-palmed Nomex gloves. He never even glanced at his sights—there was no need. If he pulled the trigger the target would die. “Put your hands where I can see them!”

What happened next was as predictable as it was inevitable. Lionel was pissed, and he was scared, the deadliest of combinations. He flung the pruning shears to the side and drew his pistol from the waistband of his jeans. It was a little .380 automatic, and he fired toward the sound of Jonathan’s voice. The bullet missed by more than a foot.

Jonathan’s did not. He fired three times before the echo of Lionel’s shot had faded, hitting the kidnapper twice in the heart and once in the forehead, dropping him like a rock. On the floor, Thomas Hughes reassumed his fetal position, trying to keep himself as small as possible.

Barry panicked in the darkness. “Lionel!” he yelled. He reached out with both hands, as if to parody a blind man.

“He’s dead, Barry,” Jonathan said. “And I’ll kill you, too, unless you do what I say. Raise your hands and spread your fingers.”

“You’re lying,” Barry said.

“Take two giant steps backward and raise your hands.” Jonathan’s tone was neither soft nor harsh. Matter-of-fact, it left no room for negotiation.

“Who are you?” Barry shouted. Panic rattled his voice.

“Hands, Barry. Don’t make me shoot you.”

Barry Patrone was clueless. Jonathan could tell from the befuddled look that he had lost his grip on what was real and what was not. The kidnapper’s eyes darted to every compass point, his pupils glowing like monster-eyes in the infrared light.

Thomas hollered behind his gag.

“Thomas, be quiet. You’re safe. This is almost over. Barry, I need to see those hands.”

“Who are you?” Barry asked again. It was as if his brain was stuck, and couldn’t progress until he got an answer. He was crying. He paced blindly, his brain lost in that corridor that separated panic from lunacy.

“I’m not waiting forever,” Jonathan said. “If I shoot your knees, you’ll hit the floor. Is that what you want? It’s your call.”

Barry shook his head frantically. He reflexively moved two paces to the left. No, he didn’t want his knees to be shot. His sneakered foot bumped his brother’s body, and he slipped in the gore, almost losing his balance. “What’s that?” he whined. He stooped to his haunches and felt out into the darkness. “Oh, God. Is that Lionel?” His hands found his brother’s shoulder. Then they found the gaping trench that had been gouged through his brain.

“On the floor, damn it!” Jonathan commanded.

Barry made an animal sound, part wail and part shriek. The sound reverberated off the walls. “You killed him!” he sobbed. “You killed him!”

Jonathan saw the hysteria in Barry’s face.

“He left me no choice,” Jonathan said, his tone more appropriate for a business decision than a shoot-out. “Don’t make the same mistake.”

Jonathan might as well have been speaking Swahili. Barry just stayed there, squatting on the floor, hugging his knees, making a keening sound. “You killed him. You killed him . . .” He said it over and over again.

Three feet away, Thomas tried to rise to his knees.

“Stay put, Thomas!” Jonathan commanded. The last thing he needed was to have his aim spoiled. “Just stay on the floor out of the way. You’re not going to get hurt.”

When Barry Patrone looked up, Jonathan saw that he’d made up his mind to be stupid. Uncannily, he looked straight at Jonathan when he said for the dozenth time, “You killed him.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Barry. You’ve got no cards here . . .”

Barry dropped to the floor and rolled to his left, on the concrete, drawing a snub-nose revolver from his pants pocket. The shoulder roll ended with Barry on one knee, aiming at the night. Jonathan took two baby steps to the side, knowing that right-handed shooters tended to pull to their left when they fired.

Barry fired, his bullet ricocheting off the concrete wall to Jonathan’s right.

“Drop it now!” Jonathan roared. Barry didn’t need to die, goddammit. Lionel had been the nut job, not him.

This time, Barry zoned in on Jonathan’s voice and aimed dangerously close. It was done.

Jonathan’s finger flinched by sheer instinct and his pistol bucked twice.

Barry made a barking sound as two .45 caliber slugs drilled his chest through a single hole, shredding his heart. He was dead before the second bullet hit.

“Damn it,” Jonathan spat. How could a ransom be worth this? He dropped the magazine out of the grip of his pistol and replaced it with a fresh one from his belt, slipping the used one into the vacated pouch. He holstered his weapon with its hammer cocked, as always, and pressed the transmit button on his chest. “Room secure, two friends sleeping. Exfil in five.”

Boxers replied, “I copy room secure. See you in five.”

Thomas Hughes was screaming, but with the duct tape gag in place, nothing made sense. From the emphasis on the hard consonants, however, the smart money said that it was mostly obscenities. Jonathan approached the young man carefully, not wanting to get kicked, and even more, not wanting to leave any unnecessary footprints in the spreading pool of gore.

“Thomas, be quiet,” he said. “You’re safe. I’m here to take you home. They’re both dead, and you’re going to be just fine. Do you understand that? Nod if you do.”

Thomas hesitated, and then he nodded. It was clearly a calculated move. The fear remained in his eyes, but how could he go wrong allowing the new attacker to think otherwise?

“I’m going to get us some light now,” Jonathan explained. As he snapped his goggles out of the way, he reached behind his head into a side pocket of his rucksack and produced a glow stick. He cracked it and shook it to life. The room glowed green again, only now they could both see.

The fear in Thomas’s eyes peaked when he saw Jonathan’s masked face. The rescuer tried hard to make his eyes look friendly. “I’m going to cut you loose,” Jonathan explained. “That means I have to use a knife. Don’t freak out when you see it.”

The eight-inch tempered steel blade of the K-Bar was honed to a razor’s edge, and looked scary as hell. It was every bit as deadly as it was utilitarian, and Jonathan didn’t relish the thought of the kid wriggling his way into a knife wound. He took care as he slipped the blade between the boy’s ankles first, to free his feet, then his knees, and finally between his wrists.

“I’ll let you get the tape on your mouth yourself,” Jonathan said. He imagined that it was pretty much welded to the kid’s skin by now.

Thomas Hughes seemed to have a hard time finding the margins of the tape. Jonathan left him to work it out himself, turning to the task of picking up his spent shell casings. All five had landed within feet of each other over in the corner nearest the splintered steps. He slipped the shells into a pouch pocket in his trousers.

Thomas found the handle for the tape on his mouth, and he peeled it away with a moan.

“Are you hurt?” Jonathan asked.

“They were gonna cut my balls off,” Thomas said. He seemed at once terrified and amazed. “Are you a cop?” He whipped his head around trying to find the other party in the room. “Who were you just talking to?”

Jonathan ignored the questions. He found a roll of paper towels near a slop sink in the corner farthest from the blasted doors and pulled off a healthy length, wrapping them around his fist. Then he soaked the wad with water from the spigot and handed the dripping mess to Thomas.

The boy eyed him suspiciously. Jonathan nodded toward Thomas’s befouled thighs and nether regions. “Thought you might like to clean yourself up.”

Self-conscious, Thomas took the towels as Jonathan looked away to grant him some measure of dignity. Jonathan stooped to Lionel’s body and sifted through his pockets. “When you’re finished wiping down, I need you to strip this guy and get into his clothes as quickly as possible. There’s one more of these assholes out there somewhere, and I don’t want to be here when he comes back.”

“No,” Thomas said. “There’s only these two.”

“Nope, trust me. There’s one more. Come on now, move.” Finding only a wallet, Jonathan moved on to Barry’s corpse, which yielded the same. He put both billfolds into a zippered pocket on the side of his ruck. Thomas still hadn’t moved. “Come on, kid. Unless you want to go naked.”

Thomas squatted and started fumbling with the laces on Lionel’s boot.

“Hurry,” Jonathan urged. “We’ve got zero time to dawdle.”

“If you’re not a cop, then who are you?”

Jonathan had had enough. “I’m going upstairs and look around. When I get back, I want you dressed, understand? Naked or dressed, we’re out of here in three minutes.”

He held the boy’s gaze, then turned on his heel. “Two minutes and fifty seconds,” he said.

Chapter 2

The main floor smelled only slightly less awful than the cellar. The Patrone brothers had decided to keep the windows closed despite the warmth of the day, and with the one tiny air conditioner in the living room silenced when Jonathan cut the power, the odor had physical weight. The place reeked of sickness and old age, a legacy, Jonathan figured, of the grandmother who’d only recently passed the property on to the next generation. Every upholstered seat back and arm cushion sported a doily. Gingham and lace were the fabrics of choice for window coverings.

Jonathan used a fist-long Maglite to illuminate his search for any documents or notes that might reveal Thomas Hughes’s identity. Sooner or later, the brothers’ bodies would be found, and he didn’t want to leave a trail.

The Formica-topped kitchen table was covered with coffee cups and soda cans and newspapers from Muncie, Bloomington, and Chicago. Jonathan guessed that their paranoia had driven the Patrones to check for a story that might have been leaked by the Hughes family. Stacked in the corner by the stove, he also found the copies of the New York Times they’d used as background in photos to prove that Thomas was still alive.

None of this was of any use to Jonathan.

What was of use, though, was the spiral notebook he found under the newspapers, in which one of the brothers had noted everything that had transpired over the past days. There were times and dates and talking points for their demands. The handwriting had a juvenile quality, as if the characters had been more drawn than jotted.

Jonathan stuffed it all into the big pocket of his rucksack. Even the newspapers, on the off chance that the kidnappers might have made notations in the margins.

Reasonably satisfied, he headed back to the basement.

Five minutes had passed, yet Thomas had made no progress. He was just as naked as before, but he’d moved from Lionel’s body to Barry’s. When the kid heard Jonathan’s footsteps, he jumped like a child who’d been caught in the act of being naughty. “This one has less blood on him,” Thomas said.

Jonathan sighed. “Good thinking,” he said. As always, the victim proved to be the weakest link in the operation. “When was the last time you had anything to eat?” he asked. Thomas looked thin to the point of malnourishment.

“How long have I been here? I haven’t had anything since they took me.”

“You’ve had nothing to eat for four days?”

“A little water, but no food.”

Not a surprise, but not at all what Jonathan wanted to hear. Hungry people moved slowly and tired easily. He reached into yet another pocket of his ruck and withdrew a package of Pop-Tarts. Cherry. “Have these,” he said. “Enough carbs to keep you going for a while.”

Thomas eyed the package, but didn’t reach for it.

“They’re not poison,” Jonathan said. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be hurt.” To emphasize the point, he tossed a glance to the bodies on the floor.

Thomas accepted the pastries and pulled open the wrapper. “Thanks.”

While the boy ate, Jonathan went about the business of stripping Barry’s corpse. He understood Thomas’s hesitancy to handle death. Jonathan hated it, too, and this was hardly his first time.

“Is Tiffany okay?” Thomas asked. He seemed to need conversation.

“Who’s Tiffany?”

“Tiffany Barnes. My girlfriend. I was with her when they came to get me. They hit her pretty hard.”

With Barry’s shoes removed, Jonathan moved north, to the waistband of his jeans. He unbuttoned, unzipped, and pulled. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything about a Tiffany Barnes.”

“So you’re not a cop.”

The comment drew a look.

“If you were a cop, then you would have known about Tiffany.”

Jonathan paused and rested his forearm on his knee. “Sometimes the police are not the best option,” he said. “Once they’re informed, you might as well fax an announcement to the press.” As he pulled the trousers free, Barry’s heels thumped against the concrete. He handed the pants to Thomas. “Here.”

Hesitantly, he took them. “I don’t want the shirt. It’s bloody.”

“You need to wear it.”

“I won’t.” The point was not negotiable.

Jonathan sighed. “Fine. Put the pants on. And the shoes. I’ll be right back.” He stood.

“Where are you going?”

“Get dressed, Tom.”

Jonathan took the steps two-at-a-time into the kitchen, again using his Maglite to lead the way, this time to the bedroom. There, he found a T-shirt on the floor. He snatched it up and headed back. In the thirty seconds he’d been gone, Thomas had pulled himself into Barry’s pants. They were three sizes too big, but that was better than three sizes too small.

“Hey,” Jonathan said, getting his attention. He tossed him the T-shirt. “No blood.”

Thomas smelled the shirt and winced, then put it on anyway. “I’m ready,” he said.

“What about the shoes?”

Thomas shook his head. “Way too big. I’m better off barefoot.”

“Jesus, Thomas, will you please quit resisting me? Barefoot is not an option, and that will make sense to you in a while. I don’t care what size they are. This is not a fashion show.”

Finally he did as he was told. “What about them?” Thomas said, glancing at the Patrones.

“They’re dead,” Jonathan said. He started for the ravaged doors to the backyard.

“But we can’t just—”

Jonathan grabbed the boy by his upper arm and pulled hard enough to let the kid know that he really had no vote in this. “Before you start feeling sorry for them, remember what they were planning to do to you.”

Thomas pulled back. “Where are you taking me?”

“Home.” His smile showed in his eyes, and the kid relaxed. People didn’t realize how beautiful a word “home” was until they’d been ripped away from it.

In his earpiece, Jonathan heard, “Abort, abort, abort. You got visitors.”

“Shit. Tell me.”

“What’s wrong?” Thomas asked. “Tell you what?”

“Not you.”

Boxers said, “You’ve got a vehicle approaching down the drive. Headlights are on, they’re going normal speed. I don’t think you’ve been made.”

“That must be Chris, our third guy,” Jonathan said into his radio. “Stay high and away. I don’t want to spook him.” To Thomas, he added, “You stay here. We’ve got one more to take care of.”

“But I’m telling you there were only two,” Thomas protested.

Jonathan made a growling sound. “Now I know why they taped your mouth shut. Stay put and keep low.” He turned away and climbed back out onto the grass with fluid grace. No night vision this time; the headlights would blind him.

For nearly a minute, he saw nothing but darkness. Then, through the trees that surrounded these acres of farmland, he saw the first flash of light, and with it the whine of an out-of-tune engine and the groan of an equally out-of-tune suspension.

His plan was to wait here on the lawn outside the root cellar until he could tell whether Chris would get spooked by the darkness of the house and try to bolt. When the vehicle—it turned out to be a paneled van—stopped abruptly ten yards short of the driveway apron and extinguished its headlights, he had his answer.

He snapped the night vision goggles back over his eyes and pressed his transmit button. “We’re made.”

As if the driver had heard his words, the van pulled hard to the left. The engine raced as the driver tried a 180-degree turn to make a run for it. Jonathan couldn’t let that happen. The last thing he needed was a bad guy on the loose. Operating by instinct, Jonathan brought the slung M4 rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired six quick rounds at the van’s front left fender. The muzzle blast ripped like thunder through the humid night. He’d loaded every third round in this clip as armor-piercing, and he wanted to make sure to blast two holes in the engine block. He was rewarded with the infrared flash of two heat plumes as the vehicle stopped dead on the pavement.

With his rifle still up and ready, Jonathan moved toward the crippled vehicle.

His earpiece crackled, “I’m on infrared, and I’ve got visual on you and the vehicle. There’s movement on the far side. He’s out of the car, moving north toward the woods. He’s using the vehicle to cover his retreat.”

Jonathan didn’t take time to acknowledge, but he liked knowing that Boxers was watching from the air. In his gut, he wanted to ignore the vehicle and chase the bad guy, but doctrine wouldn’t allow it. There might be a second guy in the van, and he couldn’t afford having someone sneak up behind him while he was trying to sneak up behind someone else.

The passenger side window—the one closest to him—was up and unbroken. Keeping the rifle tucked against his shoulder with his right hand, he used his left to pull his collapsible baton from its pouch on his web gear. He approached in a wide arc to come in from the rear. The back cargo doors of the van were closed, and their windows were intact.

“Careful there, cowboy,” Boxers said in his ear. “There’s only one of you.”

Jonathan stooped low to the ground near the back doors, let his rifle fall against its sling, and lifted a tear gas grenade from the right side of his web gear. He pulled the pin, and with the safety handle squeezed, he rose, shattered the glass in the back door with one enormous punch from the baton, and tossed the grenade into the van. As the cloud of noxious gas bloomed, he moved forward and shattered the glass on the passenger door. He confirmed in a single glance that it was empty. The fleeing driver had come alone.

“Vehicle’s clear. Where’s my target?”

After a pause, the voice in his ear said, “Sorry boss, I was watching you. I lost him. Can’t have gone far.”

Terrific. “No exfil till we find him.”

“Understood. Gauges say lots of time.” Translation: he had enough fuel to hover for as long as it took.

Something popped inside the van, and Jonathan whirled on it, rifle at the ready. Heavy black smoke was pouring from the broken window in the back. He must have lobbed his CS grenade onto something combustible.

“Your van is burning, boss.”

Jonathan started moving away from it, closer to the farmhouse, giving the vehicle a wide berth. You never knew what people carried in vehicles with them. He’d seen portable drug labs in Colombia—perfectly harmless looking trucks or vans—go high order because of the bizarre mixture of chemicals they needed to make the shit they sold. He snapped his NVGs out of the way again, turning the night from iridescent green back to shades of black, silver, and gray.

His earpiece popped again. “You got company coming in from behind you. Blind side. From the house.”

Shit. Jonathan dropped to his knee and tried to become small as the fire grew behind him, creating an ever more perfect silhouette for a shooter. The NVGs came back down, and there was his target: Thomas Hughes. Goddamn kid. These were the times when he hated working alone with Boxers. If this had been a Unit operation, somebody would have been sitting on this kid’s back keeping him from being stupid. “Get down!” Jonathan called.

Thomas froze in his tracks. “Don’t shoot! It’s me!”

“Get down!”

“It’s me!” The kid was terrified.

Jonathan rushed him, closing the thirty yards that separated them in five seconds. He slung his arm across Thomas’s chest, pivoted his hip, and flipped the precious cargo onto the wet grass. When he was down, he covered the kid with his own body. “I didn’t ask who you were,” Jonathan hissed. “I told you to get down. I swear to God, if you don’t start listening, I’m gonna shoot you myself.”

“I heard shooting,” Thomas said, grunting against the weight on his back. “Then I saw the fire and I got scared.”

“So you wandered toward the guns and the fire?”

Thomas wriggled to get rid of the weight. “Get off of me.”

Jonathan unpinned him, and scanned the horizon again for Chris.

“I came out because I thought you might be hurt.”

The comment drew a look. “Thanks, then,” Jonathan said. “I need you to stay down because the driver of that van is no friend, and he’s still out there.”

They had to move away from the van. The light made them too good a target, and it rendered his night vision gear useless. Into his radio: “Do you see anything?”

“A big-ass hot fire, but not much . . . wait. I’ve got movement—”

Jonathan saw it, too, at exactly the same instant he heard the crack of a bullet passing disturbingly close to his head. A second bullet tore into the ground near his elbow.

Thomas yelled something that Jonathan didn’t care to hear. He was busy. “Stay flat!” He nestled the M4 back into his shoulder.

The gunman kept shooting, his muzzle flashes providing all the visual input Jonathan needed. Twenty yards past the burning van, the posture said pistol shooter; the range and accuracy said good one. Jonathan squeezed his trigger, three quick rounds. He went for center-of-mass. He knew that his first shot found its mark because he saw the target stumble backward. He was pretty sure about the second shot, but the third was anybody’s guess. When he thought he saw additional movement, he fired two more.

Then the silence returned, except for the sound of Thomas screaming. He had his hands over his ears, shouting for it to stop. It was the sound of raw terror.

“Hey!” Jonathan barked.

Thomas jumped, his arms up to ward off an attack.

“Are you hurt?”

“What’s happening?” Thomas yelled.

“Are you hurt?”

The kid shook his head and stammered, “N-no. I d-don’t think so.”

“Then shut up. Stay down.”

A kill wasn’t a kill until it was confirmed. He pushed himself to his feet and headed for the tree line. Keeping low, he skirted the light-wash from the van and charged the spot where he’d seen the shooter fall. “Talk to me,” he said to Boxers.

“Not much to tell. I saw the muzzle flashes, and I think I saw him fall, but nothing confirmable. I don’t see any movement.”

The movement part was all he needed. Jonathan knew that the target was hit hard. Speed now trumped surprise. Jonathan sprinted through the underbrush with the speed of the Olympic contender that he once was, his rifle at the ready. A heartbeat later, he had the gunman’s sprawled, supine form in his sights. The wounds looked fatal, but the shooter was still breathing. “Don’t move,” Jonathan said, and he stepped closer.

What he saw next surprised the hell out of him.

Photo by Amy Cesal

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN GILSTRAP is the acclaimed author of ten thrillers: High Treason, Damage Control, Threat Warning, Hostage Zero, No Mercy, Six Minutes to Freedom, Scott Free, Even Steven, At All Costs, and Nathan’s Run. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A safety and environmental expert and former firefighter, he holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. John has also adapted four books for the big screen, including Red Dragon (uncredited), from the Thomas Harris novel, Word of Honor, from the Nelson DeMille novel; and Young Men and Fire, from the Norman Maclean book. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.). Please visit www.johngilstrap.com.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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First electronic edition: October 2013

ISBN: 978-0-7860-3293-8