Chapter Seventeen
Beckett
“Hurry.” The fucking car will not go fast enough.
I couldn't take one of my sports cars that would be too conspicuous, so we drove the Range Rover which is the fastest passenger car in my fleet.
The hackers found two possible addresses where Scarlett could have been taken.
With a little deeper research I found that the first location, the one Griffin suspected she was being held captive in, had a basement.
It was almost too perfect and that was a little terrifying because Carl knows what resources I have at my disposal.
CSS isn't stingy with hackers and folks who know how to navigate the deep dark web, especially if you have standing in the society.
The second location the taxi drove to that morning did not have a basement however it was on a farm that had a fallout shelter from the 1950s.
This was probably the better option because a person could have been kept in a fallout shelter without having to go through a home.
If her captors were people trying to live an ordinary life, they could do so by keeping her in a fallout shelter.
The shelter did not show up on any modern plans for the main house on the property.
It had been renovated once in 1975 and again in 2007 and neither of those plans showed it.
I was able to find a microfiche of the neighborhood in an archive for physical documents.
In one document, dated April 14, 1954, there was a map of a fallout shelter that had a main room and two auxiliary rooms as well as a septic tank and its own well.
This is where they are keeping Scarlett.
What I realize while we are speeding through the streets of Manhattan on our way to Upstate New York, is that Carl and likely an entire host of military-trained gorillas will be waiting for me with machine guns at the first stop.
But I have six of my own hired guns in the backseat and another carful behind us.
We are armed to the teeth. I am not going to play with these fuckers.
I know their game because my father played it as ruthlessly as they do.
I didn't participate, but I fucking watched.
“We have to go in through the backroad and we’ll cross the pasture on foot. If they see our car, this mission is fucked,” I say, being no tactical strategist.
Trevor Blaine is the former head of my father's security team. He supplied my security officers, however, this select crew was taken from a vigilante group that Marcel had connections to. ‘The ghosts’ are men without identities who are lethal weapons in their own right. No one who fights them survives. I’d asked Trevor to join the mission because, despite not trusting my father, I have a little more faith in him.
What Trevor does that the vigilante gorillas behind me and in the car trailing us cannot do as well is strategize a surprise attack.
“Yes, you're right, the safest route is on foot through the pasture.
We're going to lose some time, but she's got time.
Carl just called you with the ultimatum so he's going to expect you to try to gather something together.
He has no idea we're almost there. Now I'm sure he's got aerial surveillance and likely motion detection as well. Those are going to be mounted on anything high like tree branches and buildings so keeping to wide open spaces and laying low is the best way to avoid their detection.” I can tell that Trevor is getting off on this a little bit, he loves his military strategy.
During the last years of my father's life, all Trevor ended up doing was following the nurse around. It was probably pretty boring for a decorated colonel in the army. This is more his speed.
“And our cover?” I ask, knowing we'd be using some kind of distraction to pull forces away from the farm.
“Lobbing a few grenades, son. We just need to get in and out of there, grab your girl and go. A few grenades going off near the farmhouse and the first location will do the trick. I have a state-of-the-art launcher in the back with your men. They're not going to ignore an all-out attack, so hopefully that’ll hold their attention while we go in for your wife.”
‘Wife.’
I haven't heard anyone use the word wife other than my staff and myself. Even Mia didn't call Scarlett my wife.
In this short period of time with her life so perilously in danger, I realize Scarlett means more to me than I could have imagined.
The only reason why Scarlett hadn’t received the entirety of my love and attention was simply because of my fear.
I worried she'd become clingy or too attached but what I didn't account for was her fierce independence and my desire for her company. Suddenly, I am desperate to know the woman I’d married.
She is tempting and fascinating and the more time I spend away from her the more I want to be with her.
For the duration of the drive upstate, I think of nothing but holding Scarlett in my arms. Yes, I will remand her to the bedroom for the rest of her life.
My bedroom. It is ridiculous that we aren't sharing a space.
She needed to recover and I gave her that time which I assumed she'd wanted, but now that someone has stolen her from me I face the real danger of losing her.
It makes me realize that I need her in my bed and in my life.
“We’re here,” Trevor states and my heart explodes.
It is now or never. I send up a silent prayer hoping that I won't storm the castle to find Scarlett injured or dead. I pray they are just bluffing and trying to muscle me into doing something I won’t.
I realize I am feeling nervous for the first time in my life.
I'd always been inordinately brave, mostly because I didn't give a fuck about anything. My father made sure that I had no attachments. We didn't even have a family pet because he threatened to kill absolutely everything I cared about.
“Power,” my father would say, “is your only lover, your only friend and confidant. Having power gives you all.”
What my father failed to mention, however, was that having power also gave you nothing.
All those who capitulated to you in friendship, confidence, and love were there because of your power.
I had no identity outside of my wealth, status, and the might I wielded.
Yes, I had power, I was one of the most celebrated doctors in the community, I was a longstanding member of the Christopher Street Society, and I had more money than most people in the world.
I believed I was recently ranked the 27th most wealthy man in the United States.
Yet I had nothing greater than that tiny little baby resting in my sister's arms back in Manhattan.
That tiny baby and her mother, the woman I am rushing into a potential gunbattle to save, are quickly eclipsing my universe.
“Test your earpiece,” Trevor says.
I switch on my earpiece which is fed through an encrypted radio frequency and is a way that we can communicate with all of the troops by just tapping on the tiny earpiece that fits behind our earlobe.
The communication devices work fine.
I nod at him.
“It’s showtime,” he says with a grin.
The grenades create a firestorm and a fire which brings the local fire company out, creating chaos and headache for Scarlett’s captors.
Three of the troops and I rush toward a mound in the distance.
After traversing the pasture army-crawling and crouching, we reach the fallout shelter.
From there Trevor and his team carry the grenade launcher deeper into the landscape and launch several more grenades.
With them creating the diversion I run to the shelter which, of course, is locked from the outside.
My heart pounds thinking of Scarlett trapped underground.
We use a flamethrower and melt the fuck out of the lock and it all falls away.
Whoever is keeping Scarlett hadn’t fortified the safe house against military-grade machinery.
My guess is that this was a CSS operation, but relatively small time, perhaps just for white-collar kidnappings and blackmail.
My guess is that they didn't plan on hurting her unless I refused to make a bioweapon of mass destruction.
The guys blow through the front door, burning half of it down to discover a man sitting in a chair in front of a locked cell. He is a burly guy, probably six-foot-seven which is tall, considering I am six-four. I shoot that fucker in the belly. Blood immediately oozes out of the hole I’ve left.
Being a doctor, I know I’ve just blasted through a kidney.
It will heal and he has another, but he’ll be dead before he gets the chance to use it if he doesn’t give me Scarlett.
He goes for his gun, but the moment he does one of my men shoots off his hand; now he is fucked. I aim my gun at his dick.
“If you want to get out of this outhouse alive, you’ll show me where she is,” I say calmly.
“If you die, I’ll still find her. You aren’t being noble to your cause if you keep her from me.
As it stands you’ll go to the hospital, they’ll give you a mechanical arm, CSS will cover this all up, and give you a sweet retirement somewhere far far away.
Or SWAT can drag you out of here in a body bag. Your choice, they’re on their way.”
“Fuck you, Myers.”
I should be flattered that he knows my name.
He nods toward the cell and the guy with the flamethrower torches the fucking thing until it swings open.
“Scarlett?” I yell, walking into the dank, stiflingly hot windowless room.
I hear a tiny muffled cry and in the corner, I see Scarlett's crumpled body on a dirty mattress.
Her feet and hands are bound and her face is covered by a ski mask but it is my beautiful dancer.
No one else in the world has such perfect legs.