Chapter 14 #2
Mike pulled his head around and went nose to nose with him. “Listen up here, I know you’re worried, but I’m not going to let you fuck this up. I like Nicole, too. And the best way to bury that beautiful woman is to go in guns blazing without knowing the terrain or even where they are.”
“Blueprints of the building coming up…now,” Harry said into their earpiece. The screen darkened, then lit again with the blueprints of an industrial complex.
“See?” Mike said. “There’s at least sixty thousand square feet there. How the fuck you think you’re going to find them? By following bread crumbs?”
Sam and Mike stared at the screen. Sam sure as fuck hoped Mike was taking it all in, because he wasn’t.
A high keening sound rattled in Sam’s head, the sound of panic.
He had the classic symptoms. His heart raced, his palms were sweaty, he could barely focus his thoughts, he didn’t have a sense of his own body, only of imminent danger to his woman.
This wasn’t helping Nicole.
He leaned his head back against the headrest, pressing against it hard, and wiped his mind, concentrating on his breathing, trying to repress the very clear, spotlit image he had of Nicole being hurt that made his heart trip-hammer.
Breathing slowing, heartbeat slowing…
“Welcome back,” Mike said quietly.
Sam opened his eyes and just like that, he was back. Capable and cool, the operator he’d always been.
Panic would get Nicole killed. She was already in serious danger. He was the only thing that stood between Nicole and death. If he didn’t get himself under control, she was fucked, and he would lose her.
Sam leaned forward. “How many points of entry?”
Mike looked at him intently for a second, eyes bright blue even in the low glow of the monitor, then nodded. “Seven,” he said. His finger pinpointed the doors into the building. “Plus what could only be a big loading bay here.”
Sam turned it over in his head. “They won’t be using the loading bay. Those suckers have huge doors that take forever to open even if you find the control panel. They’ll go in through one of the side doors. They’re on some kind of timeline. Whatever it is they’re doing, it has to be quick.”
Mike nodded. “Makes sense. And I don’t think they’d go far into the building, so we’re looking at perimeter rooms.”
Sam nodded. “Here. And here.” He tapped two doors on the blueprint, on either side of the front loading bay.
If the fuckers were at all rational, that’s where they’d be. They had no idea that anyone could be tracking them. Entering into the huge maze of the warehouse made no sense.
“Jesus, I wish we had a Predator with thermal imaging,” Harry sighed into the earpiece.
Fuck yeah. An aerial image showing where warm bodies were.
“Don’t have a Predator,” Mike said, reaching behind him for his backpack. “But while Sam was freaking, I was thinking.” He hauled a camera-like machine with binoculars into the front seat.
A goddamn handheld thermal imager! And Mike was right—he’d been thinking while Sam was freaking. “I have a thermal imager,” Mike said into the mike, for Harry’s benefit.
“Sam should kiss you on the mouth for that,” Harry said.
“Ewww,” Sam and Mike replied in unison.
Mike smiled evilly. “But I will take that kiss from Nicole once we get her out.”
“Over my dead body,” Sam growled.
“Make sure it isn’t over anyone’s dead body, except for the bad guys,” Harry replied over their earpieces. “Now go get them. And afterward, Nicole has to kiss me, too.”
They were in some kind of abandoned industrial building, but Nicole had no idea where. They could have been on the back side of the moon for all she knew.
When the car veered into one of the empty compounds, big gate standing open, her heart sank.
The driver got out, growled don’t move, pulled out a big black gun and kept it pointed at her.
He could see her perfectly, since the headlights bounced off the steel walls of the building, lighting up the inside of the car.
Nicole could barely see the man, and followed what he was doing by sound rather than sight.
The two big steel gates were pulled closed, a chain run through the handles and a padlock on the chain.
She was locked in.
The man came to her side of the car, opened the door and pulled her out roughly, pushing her ahead of him.
They walked around the right-hand corner, the man prodding her painfully in the back with the gun. Along the side wall was a door, ajar, visible in the backwash of the headlights around the corner. The man pushed hard with the gun. The doorway loomed, empty and black and forbidding.
It was like walking to her doom. They’d driven for ten minutes without seeing a light, without seeing another car or another human being. There was no one around to call for help, no way to signal, no way to call. She and her father were as abandoned as this building.
There was no way out, none. Even if, by some insane series of events, Nicole managed to overcome two armed men—and there might be more—and run away, she couldn’t. Her father couldn’t walk, she couldn’t carry him and she’d never leave him behind.
Another sharp jab in the back, hard enough to break skin. Nicole’s heart beat painfully hard as she eyed the open doorway, utter blackness beyond. Something, some animal instinct told her that she and her father wouldn’t escape this building alive. The rusty abandoned warehouse would be their tomb.
“Get going, bitch.” Behind her, the driver’s voice was low, rough. This time instead of stabbing her in the back with the gun, he gave her a violent push that almost sent her to her knees.
Slowly, heart thundering, Nicole walked toward the blackness, stumbling over the threshold, then waited. She had no idea where he wanted her to go.
A heavy hand on her shoulder. “Right,” he rasped and she started walking.
There was a faint light in the distance that grew brighter as she approached it. A door slightly ajar, light behind it. She stopped outside the door, suddenly terrified of what might be behind it.
“Move it.” A hard push against the door and she tumbled into the room. What she saw raised the hair on the nape of her neck.
Her father, duct taped to a chair, hands in restraints clasped on his lap, head hung low, dried blood from the slashed cheek all over the side of his face and his pajamas.
There was a large plastic sheet under the chair. For the blood. To ensure that no DNA be left behind. A tense shiver of horror ran through her. These men were thorough. They were not going to make mistakes.
On a stool next to her father was the man who’d broken into her office. A powerful lamp on a nearby steel table provided enough light to see the hellish scene by.
The man’s head rose at their entrance and Nicole stepped back at the fierce coldness in his eyes.
She bumped into the man behind her.
He pushed her forward. “Watch where you’re going, bitch.”
Nicole barely heard him. Her father—she couldn’t see his chest moving. Oh my God, was he—
“Daddy?” she whispered out of a tight throat.
Nicholas Pearce’s eyelids flickered, opened. His head wobbled up, brows furrowed, eyes narrowed, unfocused.
“Daddy!” Nicole sobbed and he saw her.
In terrible pain, restraints so tight his hands were white and bloodless, duct taped to a chair by thugs, her father tried to reassure her. He made a stab at a smile and the deep wound in his cheek began sullenly bleeding again.
“It’s okay, darling,” he whispered. “I’m okay.”
Pain made her heart miss a beat. She couldn’t stand seeing her father hurt. The room swam as tears flooded Nicole’s eyes. She rushed forward to hold her father, but was abruptly yanked back by a big, strong hand on her arm.
“Very touching,” the man on the stool said, coolly. “Fatherly love. A daughter’s devotion. It helps me.” He picked up a big gun. Nicole heard a sharp snick! A thousand movies told her it was the safety coming off. He pointed the gun at her father’s knee. “Now. Do you have what I want?”
Shaking so hard it took her two tries to unzip her purse, Nicole reached in and brought out the portable hard disk.
Please let this be what he wants, she thought. Otherwise he’d shoot her father in one knee, then the other. She met the man’s eyes, cold, inhuman. The feral eyes of a creature of the night. There was no mercy there at all.
Still, she tried.
“Please,” she whispered, and placed the hard disk on the ground with a trembling hand. The man curled his free hand up in the universal gimme gesture. Kneeling still, Nicole sent the hard disk skimming over the floor to him. He stopped it with a booted foot and picked it up.
He put the gun back down. He could afford to.
Her father was tied up in a way a strong man couldn’t break, let alone a weak, very sick one.
She was at least ten feet from him. Even if she didn’t have a gun pointed at her back, she’d never be able to make the leap, pick up the gun and shoot.
The other man’s hand was a second from the gun and he obviously knew how to use it.
She had no options here, none. She was helpless, unable to save her father, unable to save herself.
The man reached behind him, bringing out an ultra-thin laptop.
He fired it up. It looked expensive and it was fast. With a couple of beeps, everything was ready.
Connecting the hard disk via the USB port, the man stared at the monitor.
Nicole couldn’t see anything other than the silver back of the monitor and the blue-green wash of light over the man’s cold, expressionless face.
“Password,” he grunted.
“Nickyblue,” she said shakily. Her mother’s nickname for her.
He clicked his way through something, following intently, while Nicole trembled. Though it was cold in the warehouse, sweat coated her torso, drops falling between her breasts. Terror made her heart pump so hard she thought it would jump out of her chest.
Utter silence except for the genteel, expensive whir of top-of-the-line electronics, then the man sat back with a sigh. He looked at the other man, next to Nicole. “Got it.”