18. A Son for a Son
Chapter eighteen
A Son for a Son
MICK
My phone buzzes with the alert tone for a message from Fitz.
"Wait," I order the captain giving me a sit rep on the pursuit of the hit team sent to try to take out one of my men and his wife.
Wraith and áine will be fine. The men who tried to kill them won't be.
I check the message from Fitz. His phone should not have service in the section of the Bunker where Brice took him. Ergo, my son is not where he's supposed to be.
My bowels don't turn to ice until I read the messages he sent. They're not from Fitz even if they came from his phone. They're from someone else and they're to my son. Instructions for meeting the person in Manhattan and a warning not to try to tell anyone.
Then a text that says: if you are reading this your girlfriend is about to learn a lot about pain.
Another text flashes on my phone screen. It's not from Fitz or Fitz's phone.
Unknown: A son for a son. I want mine back.
Not answering until I have more information on the situation, I hang up on my captain and make a group call to Kara, Rory, Conor and Brice. The group call is preprogrammed into my phone so it only takes a single swipe and tap. Then I drop the phone into my pocket and rely on my hands free headset.
Kara picks up first. "That was fast."
"Not done," I say shorty.
"Hey, boss," Rory says. "Did you need me at the accident site?"
I ignore him and tell Kara, "Call Miceli. I need him to have a team of his best men at…" I list the subway stop where Fitz is supposed to meet his would-be kidnapper. "I want top tier men on the platform at every stop along that line between Manhattan and Queens."
Kara makes a wounded sound. The text from Fitz just hit her phone.
Promising myself I will make this unknown arsehole pay for causing my woman pain, I tell Rory which stops I want our men to cover because we're closer and Kara the ones we need help from Miceli to cover.
"Conor picked up," Kara tells me, correctly assuming I'm not looking at my phone screen.
"This stays between us until a team is brought into play. If they aren't they never hear why they were called to the subway platform," I instruct. "They're looking for Fitz and a man, or team intent on grabbing him. If they haven't grabbed him already."
Getting Fitz onto the train gives them the advantage. If they grab him on the train and force him onto another one before we have men in place, we have to rely on Fitz's tracker. And that only works as long as he isn't taken somewhere that blocks the tracker signal.
Rory and Conor make sounds of shock. Kara is silent.
Striding toward the Corvette one of my men used to follow me to the crash site, I fill them in on the two texts I received. The Corvette will be faster and more maneuverable than my armored SUV and right now speed matters more than safety.
I hear Conor giving orders to check surveillance for Brice and/or Fitz's exit from the Bunker.
Brice hasn't joined the call.
"Throw me your keys," I bark at the owner of the car.
He tosses them to me and I catch them midflight, spinning to slam into the driver’s seat.
Calculating which stop on the yellow line I can reach before the train does, I peal into the light traffic on the LIE.
It's too far away, but I'm not risking missing the train by shooting for a station I can't reach before the train does.
Taking advantage of the zero-to-sixty in four seconds, I fly by the slower moving traffic and weave between cars with near death precision.
"I have the text stream on my app cloning your phone," Kara says to me.
Of course she has my phone cloned on an app. That’s Kara. Ready for any contingency that can use her tech skills. Does she have my lieutenant’s phones cloned too? Does she have Fitz's?
"Fitz left through the exit near 69th," Conor says. "Alone."
No one asks what happened to Brice. When he’s found we’ll know. We don’t have time for externals right now.
"Miceli says he’ll have men in place in ten minutes. Salvatore’s club is close to one of the stops, he’s going with a group of his men," Kara says, her voice devoid of emotion.
She can’t afford to feel right now. Our son’s life depends on us keeping cool heads.
"What happened to our eyes on O’Grady and Duffy?"
"They’re still under surveillance by Wraith’s team," Rory says. "I just checked their locations. Both are at home."
Plausible deniability about the attempted hit on Wraith and áine. It won’t save them if they knew about it and we will find out if they did.
But if it’s not either of them and we know where Kenneth is, who in the bleedin' hell is trying to get to me through my son?
"It could be Kenneth, using an intermediary," Kara says, reading my mind. "He managed to set up the hit on Wraith and áine without us knowing."
"I have men headed to the first stop," Rory says. "But I don’t know if they’ll make it before the train does. I’m closer to the second stop. I’m taking a team with me."
"Good."
But the first stop is still the most dangerous. Even if the men headed there are close by, the train isn’t encumbered by traffic between stops. Not like a car. And a man on foot would have to be within a block or two to get down to the subway platform before the train.
I tell them which stop I’m heading toward.
"I’m in the subway security feed. I have eyes on the platform and the exits," Kara says. "Fitz’s tracker has him at the Forest Hills station."
"Get eyes on him," I tell my wife, my tone harsh.
"He's on the platform waiting for the train," she says a few seconds later. "He’s alone."
Relief melts a little of the ice in my gut, but not much. There's too much that can happen between now and when I reach him.
A minute later she says, "He's on the yellow train. It's not an express."
My feckin' smart son. Going to the station furthest from Manhattan, taking the local train and giving us the best chance at reaching him.
Unless his would-be kidnapper is tailing him, he'll have no way of knowing which train our son got on or what station he was at. Bad planning not to tell him which station to use. Or someone not familiar with New York.
"Brice is with me. We’re on our way to the Grand Ave stop," Conor says.
"Your feckin’ chisler got me with Guardian and then knocked me flat on my ass. He stole my phone and locked me in the locker room," Brice says on Conor's phone, his voice hoarse. "Where is he?"
Conor must fill him in because the rest of us remain silent as we listen for updates from Kara.
Anger wars with pride at my son’s resourcefulness.
No one Brice didn’t trust implicitly could have gotten close enough to use even the spray developed by Miceli’s lab effectively against my lieutenant. My son used that trust against his uncle.
Feckin’ little shite.
Emotions. I’m more used to them than I was before Kara and I worked our shite out six years ago, but they’re still a bleedin’ nuisance.
And I still don’t feel them like other people. But what I do feel hits like an anvil when it comes to my family.
Shoving the weight of them away, I focus on the now and getting my son back.
"I've got eyes on Fitz on the train. He's still alone."
Kara's words hit hard, but I shove even the relief away.
"Unknown must have cloned Sadie’s phone," Kara adds. "He faked a 911 message from her and then started a conversation with Fitz. He told our son that he has Sadie and threatened to kill her after hurting her if Fitz didn’t come."
Which answers whether or not my wife cloned our son's cellphone.
"He doesn’t have her." We checked on Aine’s mam and girls as soon as we got word about the accident and I sent an extra team of security to keep them safe until we assessed the level of danger.
"Fitz thinks he does and that’s all that matters." Emotion bleeds through my wife’s voice.
Pure fury.
"We’ll get him back," I promise her.
"And kill the man who thought he could take our son."
"It could be a team," Conor says.
"It could be fifty trained soldiers and I'd kill every fucking one of them to get my son back."
"I know," Kara says, her voice as confident as mine. Then she gasps. "It's Lars Nystrom's father. He wants his son back."
"He must realize the man is dead," Rory says, his tone more worried than I've ever heard it.
"He knows," I say, death in my voice.
But I don't let the fear turning my insides back into ice out.
A son for a son.
Nystrom doesn't want to trade my son for his. He wants to kill my son like I did his and if I'm lucky, he wants me to watch. That gives me time to get to them.
Cutting in front of another car, I take the exit I need to off the LIE.
"If Fitz is still alone when the train pulls into the station, don't approach him," Kara's voice is every bit as harsh as mine.
"Board the train in a different car," I add. "Do not apprise your teams of the target unless they need to be called into play."
It's an unnecessary reminder, but I'm leaving nothing to chance.
Fitz's vulnerability and therefore mine and Kara's cannot become common knowledge. It's too dangerous for him and our other children for anyone to think they can get to him. Especially through a friend.
That puts a target on her back to match the one he was born with.
"I just sent you all a picture of Karl Nystrom," Kara tells us. "Preliminary intel shows no link to the Swedish mafia, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. He was a commando in the Swedish Armed Forces before retirement. Consider him competent and dangerous."
The only words spoken after that are check-ins at each of the stations. Rory has his team stand down at 67th without telling them why they were there, but he boards the train at the next stop. He's already dismissed his men without me telling him to.
We're keeping this in family. There's nothing Karl Nystrom can throw at us that me, Brice, Rory and Conor can't handle. Hell, I probably don't need their help, but I won't risk my son's life for arrogance.