Chapter Thirteen
“Do you know who I am?” an unfamiliar voice asked.
Maggie tried to drag her chin away from her chest, but it hurt. Everything hurt. Her head slipped back, hitting something solid. Pain lightninged across her skull and into her face. Like she’d been hit straight on by a train. She knew this feeling—hated it—and suddenly she was right back in that room. Waiting for El Capitan’s next round of questioning. Her throat worked to come up with the answer her brain automatically relied on to get her through the next few minutes. “Maggie Caddel. War correspondent. American Military News .”
Name. Rank. Serial number. It’d become a mantra of sorts. Something to help her disconnect from her body when she needed it the most. But she hadn’t needed it since... Since Jones pulled her out of Sangre por Sangre ’s headquarters. Maggie forced her eyes—too heavy—to split. And was immediately assaulted by a circle of electric lanterns and flashlights.
“I know who you are, Ms. Caddel.” A calloused hand framed her chin, directing her gaze to a face on the brink of sliding right off. It felt too low, as though gravity was winning. Age defined small eyes and creased lines horizontally across the man’s chin. Some sections were deeper than others. She’d never seen that before. A tall forehead tried holding onto a receding gray hairline. Though the man keeping her head upright hadn’t lost much elsewhere. An open collar hinted at a spread of chest hair. Perfectly manicured. It went with his expensive-looking suit. This was someone who saw himself as important. “Damn it, lieutenant. You hit her too hard. She can barely get herself going. How is she supposed to tell me what I want to know like this?”
“Sorry, sir. We had to move fast. One of Socorro’s operatives—Beam—caught us off guard. She wasn’t as easy to take down as we estimated.” Movement registered off to the left, and a second outline came into view.
That voice. She recognized it between bouts of dread and panic. The bonfire. He’d been there. He’d burned her SD card in front of her along with the bodies of his military brothers and sisters. Maggie tried to take in the gunmen poised with weapons clutched close to their vests. Six of them. All at the ready for their next order. “Scarlett.”
“Ah, there we go. She’s coming around.” Sir... Whatever-His-Name dropped his hold on her face, and her neck dipped forward. He was getting his suit dirty crouched in front of her like this. Probably have to throw it away, but something told her keeping himself clean had been the plan from the beginning. Dirty work wasn’t his forte. “I asked you a question a minute ago. Do you recognize me?”
How could she not? It was her job to recognize him. His face had been smeared across news cycles for weeks leading up to the Pentagon’s annual contractor review. Senator Collin Hawkes had branded himself New Mexico’s savior against the drug cartels. Zero tolerance. Bigger sentences. More aggressive policies. He was a husband, a father, a grandfather even. Not only campaigning for companies like Socorro Security to operate under stricter guidelines and laws—under his control, funny enough—but proposing the military step in against the cartels slowly strangling this state one town at a time.
And he was a liar.
Because now she knew the truth. Everything that’d happened in the past week—the murder of those soldiers, her abduction and torture by Sosimo Toledano, the cover-up—it’d all come from him. He didn’t give a damn about the people affected by the drug cartels. He just wanted the glory of taking them down. And she wasn’t going to give him anything. “Maggie Caddel. War correspondent. American Military News .”
A burst of laughter popped from the senator’s mouth as he struggled to turn and face the men and women at his back. “Somebody get this woman to answer me.”
The soldier—the one on her left—stepped forward. Pain ripped across her scalp as he jerked her head back by a fistful of hair, but it was nothing compared to the blade pressing against her throat. “You’re going to want to lose the attitude, Maggie. This isn’t the kind of guy you want to mess with right now.”
“You think killing me will do any good?” She couldn’t stop her own laugh from rocking through her chest. More features clarified and bled into her awareness as her vision adjusted to the brightness of the lights. No masks this time. Seemed the soldiers who’d destroyed the evidence of the ambush weren’t too worried about her identifying them now. Most likely because they were going to kill her. No one was coming. Scarlett might’ve had the chance to call in the cavalry after they were attacked at Maggie’s apartment, but Socorro and Jones had made their position clear. They weren’t in this fight. This was something she had to do herself.
It was then she realized where she was, and her confidence shook loose. She was in that same room. Zip-tied, at the control of others. Only this time she understood why she was here. And that her captors were afraid of her. Maggie forced a deep breath to counter the alarm signaling through her defenses. “You might’ve gotten rid of the photos and the bodies, but you couldn’t get to me in time. I wrote the story.”
She directed that to the senator. “How you sent ten American soldiers to their deaths during an operation they thought would hurt Sangre por Sangre . How you ordered a highly trained military unit to get rid of the bodies and kill the journalist who could expose you, then slaughtered cartel members to cover it all up. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have proof or that you’ll probably get rid of my body the same way you got rid of those soldiers. All it takes is a nudge.”
A slight shift in his jowl told her how uncomfortable this conversation was getting. That he’d underestimated how much she knew of what he’d done, and a small victory charged through her at the idea of destabilizing the man responsible for so much pain and suffering.
“You partnered with a known fugitive. I don’t know the details of your deal with Sosimo Toledano, but he must’ve outlived his usefulness after you got your henchmen to get rid of all that evidence. So you had him killed, too. What do you think will happen once that story breaks, and his daddy learns the truth, Senator Hawkes?” Maggie gave into the needles of pain stinging at her neck from the blade. Because it was something to focus on. Something she could feel when her heart wanted nothing more than to numb itself as her left leg had done.
Heartbreak did that.
Whitewashed the mind, body and spirit of color. She’d wanted Jones to be the one to pull her back from the brink. To make her believe her past didn’t have a hold on her future. And they’d gotten so close. She’d fallen in love with him. Only to once again find herself at the mercy of a man she thought she could trust. The hurt inside overwhelmed anything Senator Hawkes and his gunmen could possibly do to her physically. She’d already survived one torturer. That was the easy part. Believing in love again? That was another beast altogether.
She slipped her fingers along the structural crease at her lower back where leaking water had eroded a section of the cement floor. “How long do you think you’ll last before the cartel comes for you?”
“You want to know what I think will happen, Ms. Caddel?” Senator Hawkes got to his feet, revealing an overweight frame brought on by years of serving behind a desk. Pulling a white handkerchief from his suit pocket, he wiped his hands. “I think my constituents will see I get things done. I think they’ll see that I’m willing to put my own career—even my life—on the line to ensure organizations like Sangre por Sangre stop getting away with murder, stop pumping drugs into our schools and stop abducting our women and young girls for trade. I think they’ll want action. Action that only I can give them. Because once the people of this state see how Socorro and Ivy Bardot have let the cartel grow like a cancer to bolster their bottom line, there will only be one solution—me and my willingness to do whatever it takes to win.”
“It won’t work.” Her argument was nothing. Pathetic and weak.
“Why? Because you’ve written some piece that points the finger at me in the end? You’re nothing but a blogger whose reputation as a bipolar schizophrenic is archived in your divorce proceedings, Ms. Caddel.” The senator handed off his handkerchief to one of the gunmen as though he owned every person in the room. Maybe he did. He reached back for something from another soldier and brought it forward. Her camera. He turned it over in his hand. The lanterns glinted off what was left of the shattered lens. He thumbed the power button and a miniscule amount of light cast back onto his suit jacket. It worked. “You’re right in that Toledano and I had a deal. I guess there’s no point in keeping it a secret, seeing as how you’re not leaving this room alive. I got word through the grapevine there was a civil war simmering inside Sangre por Sangre . You see, the guy at the top has let too many of Socorro’s interferences slide without repercussions. Toledano kept pushing his daddy to make things right, but it turns out, the old man is more interested in profits than in remembering how he got them in the first place. So I approached Toledano with a deal that could benefit us both. All he had to do was be at the time and place I gave him and make sure nobody left alive.”
“It was a setup,” she said. “You got the approval for the operation by showing the military you knew exactly where Sosimo Toledano would be and at what time.”
“Yeah. Well, Toledano didn’t know the entire mission was proposed as an effort to guarantee his capture. He learned about that later. The second he slaughtered those soldiers, he’d signed his death warrant. There was nothing he could do or say to get out of us coming for him. And it worked out, too. Two birds with one stone. Toledano and his men were brought to justice, and now I’ve proven Socorro doesn’t have the resources or the motive to get the job they were hired to do done. I win on both sides. Took some doing to make sure that nobody figured out what I was up to. Altering satellite footage is harder than it looks. Not to mention making sure no one got wind of the fact that Toledano left you alive, but it all worked out in the end.” The senator fanned his hands out as though he’d just golfed a perfect round without having to cheat. “I was hoping you were smart enough to back off once I asked your editor to cut you loose, but I see I’m going to have to get nasty. You thought three days with Sosimo Toledano were rough? It’s nothing compared to what these guys will do to you once I give the order.”
“All this for me? I’m flattered.” Maggie dug one finger into the hole in the floor growing bigger at her insistence. A shard broke away, and she gripped on to it with everything she had. He was right about one thing. There was no way she was getting out of this room alive, but she sure as hell was going to fight until her last breath. She’d make it hurt, too. Make sure her remains held on to a bit of their DNA.
“I think we’re done here.” Senator Hawkes handed off the camera and nodded to the man with the knife at her throat. He backed off, sheathing it before he stepped back. “The photos you took are gone, Ms. Caddel. The bodies of those soldiers will never be identified, let alone recovered. It’ll be hard for the families, sure, but I’ll be there for them. Make sure they’re taken care of. After all, it’s the least I can do for their sacrifice in this war.”
“You’re a monster. You’re provoking the cartel, and they’ll retaliate. Only the next set of American lives taken might not be under your control.” He had to be stopped. Before this went any further. She pressed the shard through the zip ties. The plastic broke free. Maggie launched herself off the floor with the cement blade in hand and arced it directly toward the senator’s neck.
Only the makeshift weapon didn’t make it that far.
The soldier to the left caught her wrist.
“Heroes are overrated, Ms. Caddel.” The senator stared at her from behind the tip of the shard. “They don’t have the guts to do what needs to be done.”
T HE SUV’ S TIRES skidded across graveled asphalt with a scream.
Jones threw the transmission into Park and shoved himself free of the vehicle with Gotham launching from the cabin behind him. Two Albuquerque PD patrol cars angled inward on either side of the front door. Two hours. Every second she was out there was another second she might not make it home. And he couldn’t live with that.
He rounded the hood of the SUV, taking in the four-story apartment building planted just west of Albuquerque’s Old Town. Gray stucco and clean lines nodded to the state’s heritage, while electric neon paint brought the structure into the modern century and attracted millennials who preferred to work from home. Oversize windows stared out over the park across the street and the botanical gardens on the other side. The place came with a hell of a view, and, for a split second, Jones couldn’t do anything but imagine Maggie building her new life here. Searching each balcony, he tried identifying Maggie’s apartment, but they all looked the same. Her commitment and desperation to make journalism her life wouldn’t have left time or energy for her to decorate, yet he couldn’t help but want to believe her place was the one with the planter holding on to the remains of an underwatered houseplant.
Something new to signify the life she wanted to build.
Scarlett rushed through the glass front door leading into what Jones assumed was the building’s lobby, and the rest of the world caught up in a rush. Blood dried in a crusted line down her face at the left side. But it was her freshly busted knuckles that told Jones his teammate had fought like hell to protect Maggie. “Any word?”
“No. You?” He anticipated the security consultant’s answer before she shook her head. Scanning the property, he mapped out where he would’ve set up shop and waited for a target to walk into the cross hairs. The building itself wasn’t large. At least not compared to a few others going up in the area. The park didn’t provide any cover. The sons of bitches would’ve had to have seen Maggie and Scarlett coming to get the jump on them so quickly. He headed for the lobby. “Tell me what happened.”
Scarlett brought both hands to her hips as though she was trying to catch her breath after sprinting long distance. “I did everything I was supposed to, Jones. I swear to you. I walked her upstairs and cleared the entire apartment. I checked all the windows and the back door and clocked any surveillance cameras. There weren’t signs the place had been broken into. But I figured this wasn’t over, that even though we were ordered to stand down, she was still in danger. So I followed protocol. Only it wasn’t enough. Once I cleared the apartment, I left her there. Alone. I got back to the car, and I noticed the parking garage arm stuck open.”
They pushed into the stairwell and climbed the three floors before entering Maggie’s apartment. A small round dining table greeted them just inside the entryway with a terrace straight out the back door. With a single hanging planter holding onto a dying fern. The rest of the place was neat, bright and bare. They turned into the main living space, bypassing a massive kitchen island. Square cubby bookshelves lined the wall floor-to-ceiling and held stacks of books, magazines and notebooks. A desk—too large for the room—held as many, if not more, articles and notebooks. And photos.
“They stayed out of sight until they got eyes on her. Most likely through the building’s camera network. Once they saw you leave, they came from the garage.” Pressure accumulated in Jones’s gut as he shuffled through surveillance photos. Shots of men on corners, each dated over the past year with bright sticky notes. Not professional in the least. Scribbled handwriting crossed out and rewrote theories as to the identities and movements of one subject in particular. Sangre por Sangre soldiers. Maggie had spent months following and identifying low-level members of the cartel before winding up in their hands. This was where her obsession had started.
“I got off a couple rounds before they put her in one of their vehicles.” Scarlett’s voice shook, spiking his blood pressure higher. There wasn’t much that could rattle one of the best security consultants in the country. But losing a client didn’t sit well with any of them. This wasn’t about cushioning their bottom lines, Pentagon contracts or employment security as Senator Hawkes was determined to gut them for. This was about protecting those who couldn’t protect themselves. Of penance for the sins of their pasts. “I was so focused on getting to her, I didn’t see they’d left a man behind. He clocked me when I came around the corner. I held my own for a few minutes. I imagine that’s what they wanted so they could get away.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Scarlett. These guys knew exactly what they were doing and when to strike.” He forced himself to focus on the rest of the apartment and not how being in this personal space unsettled him in ways he didn’t want to think about. This place was a step into Maggie’s world, where he didn’t have control of any of the variables. Her abduction happened because of him. Because he’d crumbled at the idea she could be taken from him as Kincaide had, that he wouldn’t be enough to protect her. And he’d proven himself right by not choosing her over Socorro’s and Ivy Bardot’s agendas sooner. He’d let her slip from his fingers, and now she was going to pay the price.
He’d been so careful not to get close to anyone over the years that he’d honestly never saw Maggie coming. Her competitiveness to prove herself, her warmth despite having a cartel try to break her in every way. She was easily distracted by new leads, overthought everything and put all of her self-worth into goals she had no control over, but those were the things that made her unique. That set her apart from the other women in his life. She wasn’t perfect, but Jones didn’t want perfect. He wanted Maggie. He wanted her stressed-out workaholic approach, her inability to stick to a routine and her need for approval from others. He wanted everything she disliked about herself and more. Because he loved her.
“Security footage is no good. I already tried. Bastards destroyed the system on their way out,” Scarlett said. “I found the guard unconscious in a maintenance closet. Cops are getting his statement now, but so far, he hasn’t been able to identify a single member of the team that took her.”
And they wouldn’t. Scarlett had already proven that any nosing into military business would put them in a set of cuffs with a court date set in the far distant future. They didn’t have that kind of time. They had to come at this from another angle.
“We don’t need to identify them.” Jones tapped the edge of Maggie’s desk. He had experience with deconstructing operations, reworking them and putting the pieces back together. Iteration was key across enemy lines, improving one thing at a time over the course of a mission until you got the result you wanted. A journalist with no prior professional experience had managed to start at the bottom and work her way up. “We just need to locate them. Put in a call to Senator Hawkes’s office. I want to know where he is today.”
“The guy trying to get our Pentagon contract terminated? You think he’s involved?” Scarlett pulled her phone from her pants pockets. The shiner in her left eye was swelling by the minute, but Jones knew her well enough, she wouldn’t let something as minimal as a scalp laceration and a black eye slow her down. Putting the phone to her ear, she cut her attention to him and flashed a wide smile. “Yes, Senator Hawkes’s office, please. My name? Uh... Ivy Bardot. He’s been expecting my call.”
One second. Two.
“Oh, he’s not in the office today. Out on personal business. Oh, that would be great. Thank you.” Scarlett shook her head, dragging the phone from her ear. She punched in a series of commands on the screen. A loud ringing filled the apartment as she set the call to speaker. “She’s forwarding me to his personal cell. I can run a trace on his GPS from here.”
“Don’t you need a court order for that?” Jones asked.
The ringing cut short, sending the call straight to voice mail.
“Haven’t you heard? Socorro doesn’t live up to the same standards as the rest of the country. We can do whatever we want. It’s in our contract.” Scarlett tried to keep her smile to herself. The line clicked. “Bingo. Voice mail.”
You’ve reached —
The security consultant thumbed a few more taps against the screen, drawing Jones in. She worked fast, then turned the phone toward him. “And, I’m into his phone. Easy peasy. I can do anything from in here. Want to send a bunch of dirty messages to his contacts list and see how they respond?”
“I want his location, Scarlett. Now.” Nervous energy tightened the muscles down the backs of his legs. Maggie was in the hands of a man desperate to destroy every shred of evidence of how he’d overstepped his authority. How long would he leave her alive? “We can send the messages after Maggie’s back in our protection.”
“Got it. I guess he’s not smart enough to put his phone in airplane mode when he’s in the middle of an abduction.” Scarlett’s smile fell as she handed off the phone. The blue dot signaling the current location of the senator’s phone swelled and relaxed. Right in the middle of the one place Jones never wanted to step foot in again. “You think she’s there?”
“There’s only one way to find out. Get your gear and call in the rest of the team.” Jones took one last look at the apartment, envisioning Maggie back at her desk, working on her next story when all of this was over. They were about to officially declare war on the US military. But the realization didn’t come with the sense of dread he expected. He was going after Maggie. He was going to bring her home. And he’d take down anyone who got in his way. “We’re going to need them.”