Chapter 15 #4
The takedown had lasted less than a minute, smooth and slick.
Anyone watching would assume Ellen hadn’t felt well and friends bundled her into a car to take her to the hospital.
No one would think that a woman had been seized in the light of day by two monsters who were capable of skinning and scalping a woman.
All three men exploded into action. “Mike!” Harry barked. “Tell Henry to get the Sprinter. Have him bring it up to the Birch entrance. Stat!”
The Sprinter was one of the company vehicles, armoured and loaded for bear.
You could start a small war with the firepower stashed inside the vehicle.
And with the gear in neat foam casings, you could climb a mountain, field dress wounds, capture signals off a satellite, beam messages to a satellite, swim fifty miles under water or blow up a building.
He captured a still of the license plate, blew it up. “Shit!” he screamed. The license plate was unreadable, someone had covered it in mud.
But there was another way.
He consulted his smartphone, saw that the Mercedes was travelling at 70 mph, heading west.
Mike was strapping himself into his extra wide body armor and held Harry’s out to him. Harry talked fast as he suited up.
“I’ve got a bug on her, we can follow it via GPS on my cell. They’ve got a ten minute lead but we can make that up.” Plans, orders, action. The familiar rush of an op, to keep the panic at bay.
“As long as they’re travelling, she’ll be okay. If he wanted her dead right away, she’d be meat back on that sidewalk.” Mike had finished suiting up and was already cradling his beloved Remington 850 with a mile of scope.
Harry met Mike’s sober eyes. If they didn’t want Ellen dead it was for one reason only. They wanted something in her beautiful head and they’d shown what they were willing to do to get it
Harry’s stomach clenched as he thought of that young woman slumped in the chair. The insectoid digitized voice had said she was alive, but she wasn’t. No one could survive injuries like that, but he’d said it to scare Ellen. To flush her out of hiding.
Prickles ran under his skin at the thought of Ellen—beautiful, gentle, talented Ellen—in these men’s hands.
Both Harry and Mike took the time to check their weapons thoroughly. An extra minute wouldn’t necessarily cost Ellen her life, but a weapon that misfired could get her and them killed pretty damned fast.
Sam was suiting up too.
“Sam, stop it.” Harry put his hand over Sam’s holster. “This isn’t your fight. You stay here with Nicole.”
“Goddamnit, Harry—"
“It is his fight, Harry.” The three men whirled to see Nicole at the door.
“He couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t help you bring Ellen home.
” She fixed him with her intensely blue eyes.
“So you make sure you bring my husband home together with Ellen, or you’ll answer to me, do I make myself clear? ”
Harry didn’t need to see Sam to know what he was feeling, but he heard a short sigh of relief behind him. Sam wanted to come with every fiber of his being. Nicole knew that Sam would hate being left behind. Her words released them.
“Let’s go!” Harry shouted and they ran out the door.
At first, Ellen couldn’t figure out what was going on, where she was.
She came back to consciousness slowly, a heartbeat at a time. Hands restrained in front of her, soft background hum. The smell of leather and dust and feet and some acrid chemical, a bitter taste in her mouth.
Her eyes flickered open for just a second, then closed again. It was too much of an effort to keep them open, and there was nothing to see. Her nose was ground against something soft and gray.
Her eyes opened again, stayed open a second or two. She struggled to make sense of what she was seeing. It was hard to focus, to concentrate while she was swaying back and forth with the movements of…the car. Of course!
She was in a car, had fallen off the backseat, and her face was grinding into the footwell. She couldn’t use her hands because they were tied in front of her and the movements of the car prevented her from getting back up onto the seat.
How did she get here? Where was she?
“—about twenty minutes from the airfield. The pilots are waiting,” a raspy male voice said and shock jolted through her system.
Gerald! That was Gerald’s voice!
Oh god, oh God, she was in Gerald’s hands. How had this happened? She tried to concentrate but her head hurt so badly. She felt so dull, so out of it, as if she were at the bottom of some impossibly deep well.
The car went fast around a corner and Ellen rocked forward then backward, scraping her arm against the seat backs. Her right arm hurt more than the rest of her, hurt in a specific place, as if she’d been stung by a giant insect.
She looked down and saw a puncture wound on her right biceps, frowning. A scene flared in her head. She was running…running somewhere. Somewhere important. It was essential that she get there. And…and someone behind her, running toward her. Tall man. Blond. Running, grabbing her arm, blacking out…
She’d been stung by an injection of some kind of narcotic and it still clouded her mind. Worse, much worse, she was a prisoner, in a car with Gerald Montez and another man.
She could remember the blond man, unfamiliar but a type. Hard face, hard lean body, very fit. A soldier, she’d bet anything on it. A soldier hired by Gerald to find her. And he had.
It was her worst nightmare, come to terrifying life.
Helpless. Gerald’s prisoner.
Heading for a plane where they’d take her to where he could hurt her as long as he wanted and where Harry could never find her.