CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
So instead, he figured he should find some other way to get the answers he needed.
He had returned to his rental car and sat in the parking structure for a moment, thinking about Ortega's three-day clock.
He had just one day left. In fact, if it were a firm clock, he should be heading back to DC no later than nine o'clock tonight.
In other words, whatever he was going to do, he needed to start doing it now.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to worry about that.
The first twenty minutes were unremarkable.
Parsons drove to a grocery store on Commercial Street, went inside for approximately fifteen minutes, came back with two bags, and drove back in the direction of her apartment.
Hahn stayed three cars behind her on the main roads and dropped to one car on the smaller streets.
She stopped at a red light on Middle Street, and he pulled up two car lengths behind her and studied her in his mirrors.
She was looking at something on her phone, propped against the steering wheel.
After this, she drove south instead of back to her apartment.
Hahn followed, wondering what communication might have made her redirect from her apartment, regardless of the grocery bags currently sitting in her back seat.
She took a right onto Market Street and then a left that put her heading east, away from the residential area and toward the older industrial blocks near the waterfront.
The traffic thinned considerably once they cleared the main commercial corridor, and Hahn added distance between them to compensate.
Out here, a car that stayed at the same interval for more than a few blocks was easier to notice.
She changed lanes without signaling, cutting left when there was no apparent reason to do so, then cutting back right at the next intersection.
Hahn watched it happen and did not follow the cut immediately.
He remained in his lane and picked her up again at the cross street.
Two minutes later she took a right that added four blocks to what would have been a straight route south.
He followed from a full block back, watching her brake lights through two additional turns that accomplished nothing in terms of destination but a great deal in terms of confirming that she was not simply driving.
She was checking. She was being careful.
Hahn understood this with a certainty that settled cold and quiet in his chest. The erratic lane changes and unnecessary turns had a specific geometry to them: they were designed to make anyone following her break cover or fall behind.
She was running a counter-surveillance pattern, and she was running it with enough composure that he had almost missed it as routine inattention.
Somehow, she knew he was following her. Or she at least had a strong suspicion she was being tailed.
He pulled back further, letting a full block open between them, and took his next two turns wide so that he was parallel to her rather than directly behind. He could see her car moving one street over through the gaps between buildings.
She pulled up to a chain-link gate that was standing open and drove through into a lot fronting a cluster of low industrial buildings near the waterfront.
From where Hahn had stopped at the corner, he could see the lot clearly.
The buildings were older brick-and-steel construction with loading bays along the sides and no visible signage.
There were no other cars in the lot aside from a large work truck and an old Ford that looked as if it hadn’t been run in years.
The waterfront smell hit him even with the windows closed—salt and rust and the particular cold of the Atlantic in early spring.
Hahn followed, making no attempts to hide himself. It was pretty clear that he was following her and it would be stupid to pretend otherwise.
Parsons pulled up in front of the smallest structure in the cluster, a single-story shed or equipment building about thirty feet wide with a corrugated metal door along the front.
She put her car in park and then, before she had even fully opened her door, she stepped out with both hands raised to shoulder height.
Hahn stared at her as he opened his own door. Something about this didn’t feel right. But he couldn’t ignore the fact that the woman he had come to investigate was standing right in front of him, willingly giving herself over. He had to act.
He got out of the car and crossed the lot at a measured pace, his hand near his sidearm without touching it, watching her hands.
She was in her mid-thirties, with an athletic build and dark hair pulled back from a face that was controlled and alert.
She was pretty but in a severe sort of way, all angles and guile.
She watched him come without dropping her hands.
"Who sent you?" she asked, before he had covered half the distance between them.
He stopped about fifteen feet away. "Ma'am, I'm going to need you to—"
"Who sent you?" she repeated. Her voice was flat and direct. There was no tremor in it, and the question itself raised several alarms. Shit, I think I’ve got a big bust here. She’s one of them…
"My name is Tim Hahn. I'm a special agent with the FBI." He moved his left hand slowly toward his jacket lapel. "I'm going to show you my identification."
She stared at him. Something changed in her face, something brief and hard to read, and then she said, "Show me."
He reached into his jacket for his badge wallet. But he never got the chance to pull them out.
The stun gun came from somewhere on her left side, drawn fast and brought forward before he had registered that she'd moved. She closed the distance between them in two steps. He’d barely even found the butt of his holstered Glock before she was on him.
She pressed the contacts against the side of his neck as if it were no big deal.
The current hit him like a wall that had materialized out of nothing.
Every muscle in his body contracted at once, a single violent systemic spasm that bypassed everything conscious and took over completely.
He went down on one knee and his vision strobed white at the edges.
The pain was not quite pain in any normal sense of the word.
It was total electrical interruption, his nervous system screaming at a frequency that made individual sensation impossible.
He was aware of the ground against his knees and the cold air against his face.
And then there was little else for what felt like a long time but was probably three seconds.
He heard her running.
With a groan and trembling muscles still feeling tight and on fire, Hahn grabbed the side of his car with one hand and hauled himself upright. His legs were still unreliable, the residual current working its way out of his muscles in waves that made his hands shake and his knees want to fold.
He got himself standing by main force of will and turned to find Parsons already at her car, her hand on the driver's door.
He drew his weapon. "FBI! Don't move!"
She pulled the door open and hopped inside.
He fired twice in rapid succession, both shots going low and to the rear of the vehicle.
The first round took out the driver 's-side rear tire, the second the passenger 's-side.
The car dropped at the back end with a hard lurch and Parsons stepped back from the door instinctively, looking at the tires and then at him.
"Step away from the car," he said. His voice came out less steady than he would have liked. His hands were still shaking, and if it were not for his car, there was no way in hell he'd be able to stand on his feet.
She stepped away from the car and paused as if she was going to raise her hands again.
But then she ran. She cut hard across the open lot toward the gap between two of the larger warehouse buildings.
She ran fast and low and she covered the distance to the gap in the time it took Hahn to get his legs under him properly and give chase.
He resisted the urge to fire at her, even if it was a dead, wasted shot to slow her down.
In the slight chance he was wrong about this, such a move could prove disastrous when it came time for paperwork and debriefing.
He went after her, even though his legs were still not right.
The stun gun's aftereffect was working its way out of his system in irregular waves, and every fourth or fifth stride, his left knee wanted to buckle slightly before it corrected.
He ran anyway, his weapon holstered now so he could use both arms, pushing through the gap between buildings and emerging onto a narrow service lane that ran along the back of the waterfront structures.
It smelled of brine and old oil. The pavement was cracked and uneven, and in several places, broken into sections that required him to watch his footing.
Parsons was forty yards ahead of him. She was fast but not faster than he was at his best—but thanks to her stun gun, he was not currently at his best. The gap between them held for the length of the service lane, and then she cut right through a side door of a large warehouse building, a rolling steel door that was standing partially open.
Hahn was close enough by then that he reached the door before it could be fully pulled shut from the inside.
When he lunged for it, he nearly feel flat on his face. He cursed at his stupid leg for taking so long to catch up with the rest of his body as he jerked the door open and went in.
The interior was large and mostly empty, a high-ceilinged storage space with concrete floors and steel support columns at regular intervals.
The light came from translucent panels in the roof, flat and gray and sufficient.
There were stacks of wooden pallets along the far wall and several rusted steel racks in the middle of the floor that held nothing.
The space smelled of dust and something chemical and old.
He spotted Parsons at the far end of the warehouse.
She was rushing fast toward what appeared to be a secondary exit, a wide loading bay door set into the far wall with a push bar across the center.
She hit the bar at a run and the door shuddered but didn't open.
She hit it again with her shoulder, harder, and it gave an inch and stopped.
Whatever was on the other side was either locked or blocked from the exterior.
She threw her weight against it a third time and the door held.
Hahn slowly closed the distance, realizing she had apparently made an error. For all of her posturing and trying to lead him astray, Parsons had made a mistake.
She turned and looked at him across the length of the building.
He had his weapon up now and there was nowhere left for her to go.
The entrance she had come through was behind him.
The loading bay door she had hoped to use for her escape wasn't moving.
The wall to her left was solid brick with no openings and the steel racks along the right side of the floor dead-ended at the building's corner.
She was cornered and she knew it. But her expression didn’t change at all.
Hahn slowed to a walk when he was thirty feet away, his weapon at center mass, his breathing still ragged from the run and the residual effects of the stun gun. His neck throbbed with a deep, bone-level ache that ran up into his jaw and down into his shoulder. He was going to feel that for days.
"Get on the ground," he said, drawing his Glock. "Hands behind your head."
She looked at him for a long moment, then at the door that hadn't opened, then back at him. Whatever calculation she had been running, she had reached the end of it. She lowered herself to the concrete floor and laced her fingers behind her head. She did it calmly, as if she honestly didn’t give a damn what happened to her.
There was a coldness in her stare that made him uneasy.
Hahn kept his weapon on her with his right hand and reached into his jacket for his phone with his left. His hands had mostly stopped shaking but pulling up the Portsmouth PD dispatch number was still very difficult.
The dispatcher answered on the second ring and Hahn explained the situation.
He felt in his bones that this was a big win…
that Parsons was indeed one of Kane’s little minions.
But as he relayed the information, that cold stare from Parsons kept boring into him and he wondered if he was missing something…
if somehow, his so-called victory could also turn out to be a mistake.