Chapter 14 #3
“Great,” the man next to her answered.
“Now.” The intruder stared coldly at Nicole, picking the gun up once more, placing it against her father’s knee again. “Has this information been forwarded? Did you send the file to anyone?”
Nicole had no idea which file he meant, but she hadn’t e-mailed anyone in the past thirty-six hours.
She shook her head and he nodded. She had no saliva in her mouth to answer.
The man had the air of someone wrapping something up. It was coming to a head. “Did you send it to the cloud?”
“I don’t use the cloud for data storage.”
He grunted. “Did you copy it to a flash drive?” She shook her head. “Show me.” His voice was low, harsh, affectless.
Nicole lowered her purse to the floor and shoved it to him with her foot, as she had with the hard disk. “In the side pocket,” she said, her dry mouth making the words hard to understand.
He extracted the flash drive, inserted it into the USB port and clicked through it. If it was on the hard disk but not on the flash drive, it must be a file that had arrived on the twenty-eighth or later.
He nodded and looked her straight in the eyes. She forced herself to meet his gaze. It was like looking into a dark abyss.
“Swear that you haven’t copied or forwarded the file.” The man pressed his gun hard against her father’s knee. Sweat broke out on her father’s face, but he said nothing.
“I swear! Please, oh please don’t hurt him!” Nicole cried. Oh God, she couldn’t stand this. Her father was so sick, so fragile. He’d been without pain medication for hours. He was in agony, she could tell.
Nicole watched the man’s eyes, watched the utter indifference to her father’s pain.
A flood of rage swept through her. This man was like every cruel man who had ever lived. He enjoyed holding power over others, he enjoyed inflicting pain, simply because he could.
He looked at her for a full minute. “I believe you,” he finally said, with a nod. “Which means we won’t be needing you anymore.”
He nodded to his partner and lifted the gun from her father’s knee to place it against his head. In the same instant, Nicole felt the round cold circle of a gun muzzle against the nape of her neck.
Oh God. This was it.
She and her father were going to die right here, right now, in a cold, empty, abandoned warehouse with the stench of machine oil and rat droppings in their nostrils, where their bodies might not be found for months.
Though, come to think of it, there was the big wide ocean right outside.
Weighted down with chains, no one would ever find their bodies.
Nicole wanted to plead, to ask for mercy, but there was no mercy at all in those light brown eyes, as dead and opaque as marbles.
“I guess it’s good-bye, Ms. Pearce.” The man’s hand tightened, white showing on the knuckles.
“No!” she screamed, leaping forward, trying crazily to reach her father, as if she could somehow place herself between the bullet and her father in the time it took the man to pull the trigger.
She was hauled back brutally by the hair by the other man. He knocked her to her knees and placed his gun against the back of her head again. Crazily, Nicole braced, as if that would help her deflect a bullet.
She looked over at her father through the tears swimming in her eyes. If she could at least have departed this life looking into his eyes, so they could go together…but his head lay heavily against his chest, unconscious. He’d slip from unconsciousness into death…
Two shots rang in the room and she cried out. In shock, and then, after a second, surprise. It took her seconds to get her bearings. She was…she was still alive! As was her father, slumped and pale and broken, but alive.
A pink mist had bloomed around the intruder’s head.
He had an expression of utter and total astonishment.
He sat on the stool for a long moment, a round pink hole in the center of his forehead.
Then, suddenly, as if the weight of the gun against her father’s head were too great to bear, the pistol slipped from his hand, falling to the floor with a clatter.
Then he bent forward slowly, finally tumbling to the floor.
Nicole turned around, heart racing. The man who’d been holding a gun to her head had suddenly disappeared.
Just like that, in a second. Shock had her staring at where he’d been, stupidly checking the room.
Finally, she looked down and there he was, sprawled on the filthy concrete floor, a pool of red flowing from his head, gun still in his hand.
None of this made any sense.
Two figures stepped forward from the doorway, appearing out of the utter darkness like ghosts. Strong, substantial ghosts, hard-eyed and carrying rifles…
Nicole simply sat there, completely incapable of processing any of this, shaking, mind blank. Her entire body felt heavy with the lethargy of shock.
“Honey,” one of the ghosts said, and it was as if that deep voice shattered the chains of shock holding her in place.
Sam! Sam and Mike!
Somehow they’d found her! She drew in a shuddering breath and only then realized that she had stopped breathing. A second later, she still found it hard to breathe, because Sam was holding her so hard.
“Jesus,” he muttered into her hair. “That was close.”
“Yeah.” She laughed shakily. “What took you so long?”
He made a sound deep in his chest. Not a laugh, not a snort, but a combination of the two.
Just feeling him against her, knowing he was there, made her strong. Awareness rushed back in. The men who had threatened her were dead, but her father needed medical care and she had to figure out what was in her computer because there was no guarantee that other bad men might not follow.
Nicole pulled Sam’s head down, kissed him, then pushed against his chest, hard. Surprised, he opened his arms to let her go. She turned to Mike, gave him a resounding kiss on the mouth, then ran to her father.
“Hey!” Sam shouted.
“Harry wants one of those, too,” Mike called out.
The intruder was sprawled at her father’s feet, hand still curled around his gun, finger in the trigger guard. A second later, and a bullet would have gone through her father’s head.
Nicole stared down at the man for a moment, hating him with every fiber of her being. She kicked his arm away with disdain and knelt next to her father, frantically touching him all over.
“Daddy, Daddy, are you okay?” She tugged desperately at the duct tape.
She couldn’t stand seeing him tied up for one second more.
But no matter how frantically she pulled, the tape held.
Her father swayed in his seat as she tugged harder and sobbed.
“Damn it! I can’t get this stuff off him! ” she raged.
Big hands pulled her gently away. “Here honey, let me,” Sam said, pulling out one of those huge black knives she so wanted for herself.
Nicole eyed the man at her feet. “Too bad he’s dead. I’d love to cut his beating heart out with that knife.”
“Beautiful and bloodthirsty, I like it,” Sam said, slicing easily through the duct tape, one big hand on her father’s shoulder so he wouldn’t fall off the chair.
“Though it’s not as easy as it looks, getting past the ribs to the heart.
” He sliced the restraints around the wrists and slipped the knife back into a sheath around his thigh.
“Oh God.” Nicole looked up at Sam, tears swimming in her eyes. “He’s unconscious. We’ve got to get him to a hospital immediately!”
“Yeah.” Sam bent and lifted her father carefully in his arms. “We can drive him as fast as any ambulance. St. Jude’s is about twenty minutes away. Let’s get going.”
“I’ll drive,” Mike said. He looked down at the dead bodies, then at Sam. “I’ll have to call this in.”
“From the road,” Sam answered, turning sideways to get through the door with her father in his arms. “We don’t have time right now. Let’s move.”
Nicole scrambled to her feet, light-headed, still shocked at not being dead, and followed them out the door. Mike held a powerful flashlight to light the way.
She was halfway down the corridor when she stopped, cursing. Nearly dying had scrambled her brains. She ran back to the room that had almost been her graveyard, leaping over the man who’d nearly blown a hole in her head, and grabbed the intruder’s laptop, her hard disk and her purse.
Mike was waiting for her, a question in his eyes.
“Whatever they were looking for, they were willing to commit murder to get it,” she huffed, holding the laptop and hard disk up. “We need to find out what it is. What?” He was looking at her strangely.
They were walking quickly down the corridor, trying to catch up with Sam, who was already at the big steel gates.
“Should have thought of that myself,” Mike grumbled. “Couldn’t count on Sam to think of it, he was crazy with worry over you, but sh—damn! I should have thought of that. Here, let me carry that for you.”
He looked weighed down by about a thousand pounds of…stuff. Nicole didn’t recognize any of it except for a big black rifle, a big black pistol and a big black knife.
She could certainly carry a laptop, a purse and a small hard disk.
“No, that’s fine. I’ve got it. You just saved my life,” Nicole said as they exited out onto the dark loading apron. “You can be forgiven for forgetting things.”
“Do your thing, Sam,” Mike said, holding out his arms.
Sam gently transferred her father to Mike’s strong arms and pulled something small out of a side pocket. Two seconds later, he’d picked the padlock and was pulling the chains out of the handles. He pulled out the big steel gates just enough for them to slip through.
“How’d you guys get in?” Nicole looked around for an alternative route they could have used, but couldn’t find one. “Rappelled,” Sam said succinctly, directing the flashlight for a moment over to the right. Two slender ropes hung down, swaying gently in the chill night air coming off the ocean.