Chapter Thirty-Eight
Petra
Petra was fine with this.
She really was.
Pulling out from the shadows, she did a three-point turn, drove past where potentially the car with Herb in it would exit onto the road, did another three-point turn, and positioned herself so she could see without being seen.
Had Quantico been a while back?
Yes.
Did she practice this kind of fieldwork on the daily?
No, not even on the annually.
Stakeouts weren’t Petra’s thing. Riding on planes next to demon-dispelling, prayer-bead-munching acolytes was her thing. Attending meetings to know what was going to be allowed on one’s person during the great vacuuming flight into the cosmos before the lizard people arrived—no plants, soil, or polyester—was her thing.
But honestly, how hard could this be?
Pull in and block their car.
Don’t put your vehicle in park but reverse. Get the steering wheel lined up properly for peeling out. Be ready to drive crouched low in the seat.
That last one was a little bit fingers-crossed thinking. Hawkeye was right that the only thing that might stop a flying bullet was the engine block.
Out and away.
Their vehicle had been a cloth top, and that top had been folded down. They didn’t need to get out of their car to use the light source.
That could be problematic—Oh! Oh! Here they came.
All right.
In Petra’s head, the plan was so much easier than the doing.
Focus. There’s a child in the hospital. She’s having seizures, and the doctors don’t know what to do.
For Petra, when she presented a couple days ago as a medical mystery, as a conversant adult with a “fiancé’s” support, they let her walk out the door unsolved. The hospital couldn’t release the child until someone fixed her, right?
The child —that’s why Petra was here.
This was what she was doing.
By the light of a full moon, Petra put the SUV in neutral. Slowly but surely, the gravel began to crunch as gravity tugged and her tires rolled. After picking up momentum, she moved the shifter to L to engine brake without needing to tap her foot brake with their red look-at-me lights.
She felt a shiver go through her body as the kidnapper’s vehicle eased into the parking lot and over to the space she’d predicted.
Petra loved it when her predictions were right. And honestly, it wigged her out a bit. If she didn’t know enough about brain science, she would call this psychic.
Once her SUV edged up on the parking lot, she turned on her engine, flipped on her lights, and followed all the steps.
Car in reverse, the wheel turned, the engine as a bullet blocker, and the window goes down.
“Hey, Herb, it’s me from the tidepool. Hey, got a sec?” Cool as a cucumber. “I won’t interrupt what you’ve got going on. But your daughter is in the hospital, and the doctors need to know what’s happening with her health because she’s not doing well. Is she on seizure meds?”
“I don’t know what to do here,” Herb said in a voice that sounded like perspiration.
“Who is she?”
“An author,” Herb said. “She was in the car with me when we went to the tidepool.”
“How did she know you’d be here?”
“She took a wild guess,” Petra called in a singsong. “Just the medical info, and I’ll be on my way.”
“Amanda, my daughter Amanda, she had measles when she was an infant.”
“What’s happening right now?” the kidnapper asked.
Shock and awe is happening.
As a breeze picked up and the branches swayed, Petra saw a gun pointing at Herb.
“Measles,” Petra repeated. “What did that do to her? They said she had a seizure?”
“Uhm. Yeah. She’s—” Herb had to stop and pant. And when he did, the gun inched closer and waggled to get him talking. “She’s Deaf,” he stammered, “and has a learning disability that makes her about the mental age of a three-year-old, and she has epilepsy. But that wasn’t a problem when she took her medicine.”
“Move on now. You need to go and tell the doctor. Go on,” the kidnapper called.
“Sorry. I’m sorry, two seconds more. I need the doctors to know because if she were to die, the authorities would want to know who to blame. Better to keep her alive, right, Herb?” Petra came very close to threatening a guy with a gun. Shit.
“My wife said that she thought Amanda would be fine with a natural syrup that she was making. It takes her all day to make it. It’s got lots of steps and lots of ingredients. I don’t know what to tell you other than we needed some medicine that would work if a pharmacy was too far away.”
“Shut up,” the man hollered. “Actually, you, in the car. You come and talk to me.”
“No need. I’m leaving now.” Petra shifted her foot from the brake to the gas pedal, draped her arm over the seat and looked over her shoulder as she pressed the pedal down to back out of the lot.
“I said, come talk to me.” The bang was as unexpected as the pop that followed.
Petra jumped as high as her seatbelt would allow, her shoulders came up protectively around her ears and stuck there, her elbows tight against her body.
The SUV’s steering wheel pulled hard to the right. The guy had taken out her front tire.
Petra worked to organize her body into following her plan, peel out, screech off into the distance, circle back to collect Hawkeye and Cooper.
But Cooper was having none of that.
A streak of black against black pulled her attention around. Cooper bunched his haunches underneath him and leaped.
The shrill of Petra’s scream filled the air.
She supposed her limbic produced the sound in service of Cooper by pulling attention her way.
Petra hated when she was both living the emergency and also, somehow, an onlooker sitting on a stool in the corner, calling out her observations.
That’s what was happening to her now.
Cooper flew over the top of Herb and locked onto the kidnapper’s gun arm.
Petra had her belt unlatched, her door open, and was rolling away from the SUV.
Herb was racing across the parking lot.
And somehow Petra was on his heels. Then she was diving, arms scooping around his knees, and they both went crashing to the ground.
In her mind, she was back in the lake, protecting her neighbor from the bully.
And just like at that lake, once she had the guy in a hold, the good idea fairy flew away.
Hawkeye was calling Cooper off the terrified kidnapper, in the glow of the overhead lamp, Petra could see blood dripping down the bad guy’s injured arm.
Good. He should be in pain.
Petra pulled her badge around—the one she swiped through the machine to identify herself as she entered the J Edgar Hoover building—and commanded, “FBI, don’t move!”
Nope. This didn’t at all go to plan.
***
While they waited for Rowan and his buds to finish up at the house, Petra had called the hospital with the information about Amanda Peterson.
It was a long wait for the gun toting, actual badge wearing special agents to show up.
Prescott was back with the family and the other kidnapper.
Finley and Rowan climbed from the car.
Rowan was shaking his head at her. “Spot on,” he called as he walked over.
Herb and the kidnapper lay side by side on the ground, knees bent, shoelaces tied together, hands laced behind their heads. Cooper—who was thoroughly pleased with the way the evening had gone—sat guard.
Gun or dog? Petra would probably choose the dog every time.
After all, you can’t snuggle with a gun at night.
And the dog came attached to a wonderful man.
“Checking on you,” Rowan said, stopping in front of her. “This was genius. But I told you to step away.”
“I—”
“You were saving a child. I know.” He gave her a hug. “How are you?” Rowan turned to stand by her side and observe.
“A little wigged out, thanks for asking.” Her eyes were on Hawkeye and his on her. “Cooper’s happy.”
“Cooper’s always happy when he gets to eat the bad guy.” Rowan chuckled.
“You’re not arresting Herb, are you?” Petra asked on an exhale.
“This is a big case. We think it’s best if we turn the Johnsons. Having informants on the role might help us figure out what the Prokhorovs are building next in terms of their psyops.”
“Herb’s been over there processing his life and his choices out loud. Seems like the Prokhorovs have figured out how to leverage doomsday cults. Not just big money to pay for the family’s psyops endeavors. There’s an army of adherents who no longer think. It’s like those gamers using Taylor Knapp's video games only on steroids. The fast videos you gave me to process work really well. Too well. It’s insanity. We can’t let this happen.” Petra said. “Tax-free church money and a variety of First Amendment rights protections. I think the Prokhorov Family has landed on the legal means to leverage America against itself.”
Rowan kicked at the ground. “A goal that they have been pursuing for generations.”
They stood silently side by side while the kidnapper and Herb were moved to the back of Finley’s car.
“The brain is a magnificent thing. It looks like all of this magically fell into place, but it can be traced from one step to the next,” Petra said.
“Walk me down that path.” Rowan crossed his arms over his chest.
“From Hawkeye’s point of view, this will probably look too neat. Too coincidental. The world doesn’t work that way.”
“Let’s go through this logically.”
“I’d prefer that,” Petra said. “Because I wasn’t sent down here on fairy dust to take down another Prokhorov cell.”
“You weren’t at all.” Rowan insisted. “You were going with Tamika to spread her parents’ ashes. It had nothing to do with work.”
“No?”
“Petra, this wasn’t an op. Tamika’s parents got married down here, and she didn’t know what to do with the ashes. She figured she’d do it here.”
“Why did Tamika land on the idea of spreading the ashes in St. Croix? I would postulate that it was because, about six months ago, your team suspected some activity was going on in the United States Virgin Islands.”
“We couldn’t find it,” Rowan said. “Now we know from Jenny Johnson it was the jump-off spot. They asked their adherents to commit crimes. If caught, they pled guilty, and then The Family moved them to safety and gave their followers a new name. Exactly as you suggested, no passport, no worries. Go to the islands and get a boat. From that boat, jump to a new boat, and everyone vanishes. Pockets get lined. Kudos. That was some masterful speculation. You were dead on.”
“That’s fine. I don’t need kudos. Just back to my list. We can both agree this area was on Tamika’s mind and probably influenced her to come. Once we were here . . . me . Once I was here, I found that St. Croix is a small island. Visitors are grouped in hotels and guest houses along the shore. There are only so many restaurants. There are only so many places to go and only so many tourist things to do.”
“To make the Petersons look like they were here on family vacation they’d have to do those things, right? Go to the beach. Take the family to the tidepool,” Rowan agreed.
“In this case, that was part of the Johnsons’ escape. But before that, sure, they probably did things to blend in. Because the Christmas Winds were unusually strong, a lot of the tourist things—hunting lionfish, snorkeling, swimming with horses—were unavailable, tightening an already limited number of things to do. That’s how I ended up in the vicinity of the Johnsons. And then there’s you.”
“Me,” Rowan said.
“Why are you here? Because of Avery.” Petra answered her own question. “Avery was talking to me on the phone when I was at the airport. And when I think of Avery, I think of you.”
“Thank you,” Rowan said with a smile.
“When I saw Herb there, that necklace bothered the shit out of me. It made me feel vulnerable, and I didn’t know why. But I felt compelled to tell you about it. And up until the moment you and Finley pulled up in this parking lot, I didn’t know why.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” Rowan said.
“I was in your office last July. I was running in and didn’t knock.”
Rowan pointed at her. “I remember that. You ran in. The image was on my monitor. I flipped it off immediately. You must have seen it.”
“Not seen it,” she corrected. “Clocked it.”
“How’s that?”
“If you left the image there and acted like it was a nothing burger, it wouldn’t have stood out to me. That your reflex was to hide the image meant my mind tagged it as significant.”
“You’re a thousand percent right. I’ll have to figure out how never to do that again.”
“Lock your door?” She shrugged.
“I see the whole thing unfolding just the way it would for a brain wired like yours. From the beginning, the necklace bothered you. You knew it was associated with something bad—which it is. Your conscious brain kept looking for the answer, so you went and pressed the mom. You followed the child. You got the necklace. You tucked it into your pocket and kept thinking about Avery, who is tied in your brain to me. All of this makes perfect sense. You had all the steps, but you just didn’t have enough information to put them together. And as you and I know so well, the brain is an incredible thing.”
“It is that. But here are the things that were starlight and pixie dust,” Petra held up a finger, “the unexpected seismic activity.” Another finger went up. “A young girl who was not putting up with that mess. A third finger, “Hawkeye and Cooper.” She smiled over at them so they knew she was still okay, and Hawkeye started over to her.
“Looks like you two are getting on,” Rowan said as he stepped aside. “I need a word with Finley before they take off.”
“Everything okay?” Hawkeye asked as Cooper thrust his head under Petra’s hand.
“Rowan and I were just going over how this all happened, how we got to this place.”
He leaned down and gave her a kiss. “Destiny?” he asked.
Petra snuggled into his arms, laying her head on his chest where she could hear his heart beating strong and steady. “Yes, that’s exactly what I told him. Destiny.”