Chapter 34 #2
“No!” Jed and I said, in unison.
Freya gave us that look, the one we knew too well. “Don’t even try to stop me.”
“The six of us can go,” Remy said, not bothering to participate in the argument. “You, Jed, Freya, and the three of us. We can send in some of Shane’s drones to suss it out. Everyone else on the roster, plus Kat, holds down the fort here, to cover Holly.”
“Let’s get packed and ready,” I told them.
I walked back to the apartment to find Kat, angry at myself for bringing up her sisters like that. That was needlessly aggressive, and I had regretted it instantly.
I found her curled on the couch next to Holly. They were watching an enormous snake slither through a gothic dungeon on the screen while the boy wizard fought for his life. Didn’t seem very reassuring to me, but what did I know.
Kat did not acknowledge my existence, so I leaned over her shoulder. “Can I have a quick word in the kitchen?”
She turned blazing eyes to me. “Maybe, if the quick word includes an apology,” she said. “Otherwise, I’ll pass.”
“It does include an apology,” I said. “That’s first item of business.”
She studied my face for a moment and gave Holly a quick kiss on top of her head. “Be right back, honey,” she murmured.
She followed me into the kitchen, and leaned against the entryway, arms crossed over her chest.
“I’m sorry I said that,” I began. “I shouldn’t have brought up your sisters.”
“That’s for sure,” she said. “Don’t do it again. Or I am out of here like a shot.”
“Never again,” I promised. “But we are going to check out that warehouse.”
Her mouth tightened. “Oh, God, Ethan. Don’t.”
“We’ll be careful,” I told her. “We’ll send in a drone first. Shane designed them for just this kind of thing. We won’t go in ourselves unless it’s perfectly safe.”
Kat shook her head. “There’s no such thing, and you know it. Not with these people. They just reached inside your own house and smacked your little girl, right in front of you. Now you’re running right into the bag they’re holding open for you. Like a chump.”
I shook my head. “We’ll be in and out in no time. We’ll come right back to analyze any intel we gather. Don’t worry. We’re all of us boot-leather tough sons of bitches. We’re not running into anybody’s bag. I swear to God.”
“You’re tough sons of bitches who are not thinking clearly,” Kat said grimly.
“I’ve got a small army of guys staying here to guard you,” I assured her. “You’ll look after Holly for me? You won’t leave her alone?”
“Of course I won’t,” she grumbled. “But I hate that you’re doing this.”
I’m sorry, but we have to,” I said. “It has to be done, and it’s not as if there’s ever going to be a better time to do it. What else can we do?”
“Just be really fucking careful,” she said fiercely. “Promise me you will.”
“Always.”
I followed up with an ardent kiss, so passionate Kat swatted me away, laughing. “Save it for later, lover boy. I’m too uptight to appreciate your seductive wiles right now.”
We packed up the van with all the equipment we thought we could use, and plenty more, for just in case.
I tried several times to convince Frey to stay here with Kat and Holly, using bullying, guilt, and every other tactic under the sun, all to no avail.
Jed tried just as hard. We might as well not have bothered. It was like talking to the wind.
We got on the road and sped down the mountain highway.
It took a tense and mostly silent hour and twenty to get to the coordinates of Helmsworth.
We stopped about a mile away, and sat in the back of the van watching as Amos and Darius piloted two of Jed and Shane’s designs, small Ready Line mini-drones, into the abandoned facility.
The drones were as small as they could possibly be while still bearing their full load of cutting-edge sensors.
Shane’s focus had always been combat robotics. He liked keeping his human personnel safer, so robot recon was his obsession. We had many of his ground-breaking designs in our arsenal.
The drones showed us a desolate, completely abandoned facility. No cars parked nearby except for a rusted-out wreck with no tires, vines twined around its axels.
The Drakes piloted the drones up and through the broken windowpanes that had allowed us to identify Helmsworth.
They drifted and into the big, dim, cavernous warehouse space.
There wasn’t much to be seen. Shane was not there, of course, but the mechanism bolted to the metal beam to which his chain had been fastened was still there.
The bucket we had seen in the video was also still there, knocked over.
In the middle of the room was an old desk chair.
A telephone with a shattered screen lay on it.
We ran the drones around and around the interior. The sensors caught no discernible explosives, chemicals, toxins, though their range was limited because of their size. We saw no signs of people. The motion detectors on the drone saw nothing moving. The place seemed utterly abandoned.
“Those assholes don’t have Shane,” Amos said grimly. “If they did, they would have been making us jump long ago.”
“Wex Boer told me his team was attacked, and that Shane was taken from him,” Freya said.
“Taken by a competitor, but he never said the name. He said he had no idea where Shane was, for what it’s worth.
He could have been lying, but why would he?
Maybe this video was shot before Shane was re-stolen from them. ”
Wex Boer had been an ex-colleague in the Army Rangers, and with his own group of mercenaries, he had also been an occasional business partner of Shane’s.
Until Boer sold him out, with Nicole’s help, and arranged for the total destruction of Shane and Jed’s security company, Ready Line, along with the murder of their other colleagues, and Shane’s abduction.
Nicole’s outfit had tried to pin the blame onto Jed, and stage his accidental death from a car accident, as well.
They had failed on both counts. In large part because of Freya.
“If these assholes don’t have him, who the fuck does?” Jed mused. “And why aren’t they making demands of us?”
The painfully obvious answer to that question burned in the air, but no one articulated it. Shane had to be dead, after all this time, after the abuse we had seen on that screen. I kept trying to swallow it, but it just wouldn’t go down.
And Kat’s crack about us behaving like kittens chasing a laser pointer…that analogy was bothering me more every second that passed.
“Let’s go in,” I said brusquely. “In and out. Film it, so we can analyze the video later, but let’s not hang around here a second longer than we have to.”
We made our way silently into the complex. No need for the bolt-cutters. Large sections of the rusty chain-link fence were down already, so we tramped right over them. We crept alongside buildings, darted swiftly across the open spaces, and approached what looked like a side entrance.
Someone had blocked it open with a brick. Some time ago, from the quantity of leaves and pine needles from the nearby trees that had blown inside.
I pushed the door wider and stepped inside, smelling mold, rot.
Water damage stained the walls, cobwebs decked the corners.
A cockroach scuttled into a crack in the floor as we walked in.
The place was profoundly silent, until that silence was broken by the earsplitting roar of a plane taking off from the nearby airport—then silence again.
I saw no surveillance equipment, but that meant nothing, as it could be so easily hidden. It was safe to assume they were watching us as we did this. A flesh-creeping thought.
We moved through the place as silently as ghosts. Huge chambers where scaffolding reached the ceiling, some rolls of wire still piled on the bottom shelves. The wind whistled and moaned around the roof.
Then we walked into the huge, empty room that we all recognized from the video. We looked up to see the guide mechanism bolted to the beam on the ceiling.
The chair in the middle of the room happened to be eerily lit up by a sharp, distinct ray of light that slanted through the broken window.
It was like a spotlight. I walked toward the chair, boots crunching in the dry leaves and grit that had blown through the open panes of glass.
The rest of them followed me, Amos and Remy both wearing headgear with cameras that filmed everything, leaving their hands free.
We all stared down at the cell phone that lay inexplicably on the chair. It had a white winter camo cover.
“Oh, fuck me,” Jed said softly.
“What?” I demanded. “What do you see?”
“That’s Shane’s phone,” Jed said. “His private phone. The one he used only for family. I recognize that cover.”
Freya reached for it.
“Don’t,” I said sharply. “Do not touch anything, Frey!”
She shook her head and picked it up. “I have to see.”
She hit the button. Amazingly, the thing turned on. We saw the image appear behind the shattered screen. An old photo of Holly jumping rope and laughing. Her hair was in the air, lit up by sunshine.
The phone’s screen went black, and a cackling shriek of canned laughter assaulted our ears. Wicked-witch-in-a-cartoon type laughter. Suddenly, a countdown appeared on the black screen. Ten…nine…eight…seven. Fuck!
I grabbed the phone from Freya’s hand, hurled it away from us. “Get down!” I yelled, flinging myself on top of Freya.
Boom. The phone exploded, several yards away from us.
We looked up. Sickening, sulfurous fumes were heavy in the air.
Everybody looked okay. Freya was wiggling beneath me, making protesting sounds. I rolled off her, and got up, my knees weak and wobbling.
“Holy shit,” I ground out, my voice shaking. “That was close.”
“Yes,” Amos agreed, as he got to his feet. “But they’re just fucking with us.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“That wasn’t a big enough explosion to kill us,” Amos said thoughtfully, staring at the blackened spot on the floor, the bluish smoke cloud that hung in the beams of light from the windows. “It was just a message. They still don’t want you dead.”
“Scared the shit out of me,” Jed said, hugging his wife.
“Kat was right,” Freya whispered. “The bastards are playing with us. It was a trap. They lured us here…but for what?”
“I say, let’s get the fuck out of here and ponder it elsewhere,” Darius said.
Sounded like a great idea. We hauled ass without another word.
I was so unnerved, I pulled out my phone for one of my check-ups with Mick.
I was early, and he was going to give me shit for being paranoid and micromanaging, but hey.
Indulging myself when I fucking felt like it was one of the perks of being the boss.
The phone rang…and went to voicemail.
My guts dropped straight down. Mick never missed a call. I tried Ryder, then Trey. Cade. Dale. No response.
“No one’s answering their phones at the Mountain House,” I announced.
Their heads all whipped around as we loped toward the downed fence.
“The fuck?” Amos asked, yanking out his own phone.
I pulled up the app that monitored the security feeds.
Jed, Freya, and the Drakes were all doing the same.
I shuffled through the images. They looked tranquil enough.
Front view, gate view, front terrace, breezeway, just like they always were, no broken glass, no bullet holes.
But I didn’t see anyone there. Looking through the picture windows into the TV room, I didn’t see Kat and Holly on the couch, either.
Then again, they could be in the kitchen, or Holly’s room—
“Oh shit,” Jed muttered. “Security room. Helipad.”
I flicked immediately to those images. The computers were unmanned, and I saw Cade, lying full length on the floor, unconscious.
I saw the booted feet of some other man, disappearing into the other side of the camera’s view.
At the helipad, Mick was sprawled on his side by the stone wall.
I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead.
As we took off running, I heard Nicole’s mocking laughter in my mind. We were executing her plan exactly as she had wanted us to.
We were just a bunch of kittens, playing with her fucking laser pointer.