Chapter 5
Irene had never seen such a mansion. Situated next door to the rectory, it was the massive structure she’d noticed on the way into town.
Jonathan ushered her through the front door and she was nearly overwhelmed by the opulence of the place. Everything from the sprawling oriental carpets to the mahogany stair rails were of the highest quality. The chandelier in the towering thirty-foot foyer glistened with millions of crystal baubles. She figured it weighed more than her car.
“So you say you’re an enlisted man in the Army,” she commented as she took it all in.
“Actually, I’m a noncommissioned officer. An E-8. First sergeant.”
“They must pay you very well.”
“I’m very good at what I do.” He led the way down the hall to a room on the right. This had to be called the library, just because of the floor-to-ceiling shelves of books. He helped himself to a comfortable forest-green leather chair and, with a sweeping motion of his upturned palm, he invited Irene to sit wherever she liked. She selected a silk-fabric love seat directly across from the fireplace.
“My real home is on post at Fort Bragg,” Jonathan went on. “This is just the place where I grew up.”
Irene felt her eyebrows scale her forehead. Richie Rich has nothing on this guy.
“Jonny, is that you?” a voice called from somewhere outside of the room.
Jonathan actually blushed. “Yes, Mama, it’s me.”
He lives with his mother? That didn’t fit Irene’s view of this guy at all.
Jonathan stood and walked to the door, where he met a round black woman as she crossed the jamb. Her eyes widened as she noticed Irene. “I didn’t know you had company,” she said in a Southern drawl as smooth as honey. Her words dripped disapproval.
“Mama, it’s not what you think,” he said.
Irene tried to help out, rising from her seat and offering her hand in greeting. “I’m Irene Rivers,” she said. “Special agent with the FBI.”
The woman hesitated before accepting the gesture of kindness. “I’m Mama,” she said. “Mama Alexander, if you’d prefer.”
Irene hesitated, not sure if she understood.
“Mama is a mainstay here in Fisherman’s Cove,” Jonathan explained. “Lived here her whole life. Tell anyone in town that Mama is your friend, and every door will open for you.”
Irene harbored no doubt that the converse of that statement was equally true. “A genuine pleasure to meet you,” she said.
“I’m helping Irene out with a problem she’s having,” Jonathan explained. To Irene’s ear, he sounded oddly like a teenager covering his tracks.
“Uh-huh,” Mama said. “Well, I’m pleased to meet you, too.” She turned her gaze back to Jonathan. “Will you be wanting dinner tonight?”
“Don’t go to any trouble,” Jonathan said.
“And should I set an extra place at the table?” Her glare heated the room another twenty degrees.
“Not for me,” Irene said. “I won’t be staying. Thank you though.”
Mama’s face remained locked in a scowl. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Well, drive carefully on your way home.” To Jonathan: “You remember to be a gentleman, young man.” As she walked away, Jonathan closed the door behind her.
Returning to his chair, the redness in Jonathan’s cheeks hadn’t dimmed completely. “Mama was our housekeeper when I was growing up. My mom died when I was little, so Mama pretty much raised me.” He gestured with open arms. “This is her house now.”
Whoa, that’s not what Irene had been expecting. “Excuse me?”
Jonathan dipped his head as he clarified. “Well, it actually belongs to St. Kate’s now, but on the condition that Mama and her daughter get to live here in perpetuity.”
“What does a church want with a mansion?” Irene asked.
“They’re going to turn it into a school,” Jonathan explained, “exclusively for the children of incarcerated parents. We’re going to call it Resurrection House. Care to guess who the chief psychologist is going to be?”
“Dom.” Just from the way he’d stated the question there could only be one answer.
“Bingo.” Jonathan cleared his throat and crossed his legs. “To the business at hand,” he said, changing the subject. “I think we need to rock Jennings’s world. Knock him completely off balance. That will give us the edge when it comes time to questioning him.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” Irene said. In fact, she had stopped understanding the narrative of her life about thirty minutes ago.
“You will,” he said. “You must be hungry. When was the last time you ate?”
Good Lord, this guy could whipsaw a conversation. She started to answer, but stopped when she realized the truth of it. “I don’t know. It’s been a while.”
Jonathan stood. “Go get some food,” he said. “Go to the end of the walk, turn left and walk to the bottom of the hill, to the river. You’ll see Jimmy’s Tavern. They’ve got better food than you think they will, and an excellent selection of single malts. Go with the Tavern Burger. Enough protein in that to keep you going for the rest of the day.”
“I shouldn’t,” Irene said. “If I’m going to be a part of this, I want to be part of the planning.”
“And you will be,” Jonathan said. “I promise. I just want to put together a little show-and-tell is all. Give me an hour. Even forty-five minutes will do.”
This wasn’t right. At so many levels, it wasn’t right. “I don’t want to leave you with all the legwork. I can do—”
Jonathan cut her off. “Irene. I don’t want you to see the details of what’s coming next. When you see those details, you’ll understand exactly why I don’t want you to see where they came from.”
There it was. She stood. “Okay, then. See you in an hour.”
As Jonathan walked her to the door, she was again taken by the sheer majesty of the place. Where did anybody get this much money? And once born into this much money, who in their right mind would walk away from it in favor of a fifty-thousand-dollar paycheck from Uncle Sam?
“I’m sorry for the mysteriosity,” Jonathan said as he opened the door. A flash in his eyes told her that the made-up word was a joke.
“I understand,” Irene said. “Trust is a journey. We’re just on the first step.” And of the two of us, I’m the only one who’s fully exposed, she didn’t say.
“Tell Jimmy that Digger sent you,” Jonathan said. “That’ll either get you a few dollars off the bill or get you thrown through the window.” Again, his eyes sold the humor. In a rugged nonglamorous way, Jonathan Digger Grave may well have been the most handsome man she’d ever met. Good Lord, those eyes!
As she navigated Jonathan’s directions to the sidewalk and then down the hill toward the Potomac River, Irene marveled at the charm of Fisherman’s Cove—a place she’d never heard of before Dom had announced that he would be moving there. It appeared that the residential part of town ended at the church, and that everything downhill from there—she had no idea what that compass direction would be, thanks to the complex geography of the Northern Neck—was part of the business district.
At a time when small-town America was heaving its last sighs, this little burg still teemed with life. More important, it apparently teemed with cash flow. Where painted clapboards faced the sun, she saw none of the cancerous peeling that she’d become so accustomed to. As she closed in on the bottom of the hill and the river that lay beyond, she was even more amazed to see that this was still an active commercial fishing village. Hardworking hard men swarmed to offload the day’s catch.
Jimmy’s Tavern sat exactly where Jonathan had suggested it would, at the bottom of the hill, and just a tad to the right. As she crossed the street, her eye was drawn to an old-school three-story firehouse that appeared to be in the throngs of being demolished. It registered with her only because her uncle on her father’s side had been a volunteer firefighter.
The much-touted Tavern Burger turned out to be a lethal assortment of butter, fat, and sodium, so Irene opted for the Cobb salad instead. She asked for dressing on the side, but it came pre-slathered anyway, presenting its own lethal combination of fat and sodium. The butter might well have been there, too, but if it was, she couldn’t put her finger on it.
The hour crawled by like three. When Irene returned to the mansion and rang the bell, the door opened within seconds. Mama Alexander stood in the opening with a look on her face that was significantly less harsh than the one from earlier, but still three clicks shy of welcoming. “Come in, Irene,” she said.
“Hello, Mama.”
“Jonny is waiting for you in the library, where he was the last time.” She gestured down the hall with an open palm.
Irene stepped inside. “Thank you.”
“You be careful now,” Mama said. “Don’t you go gettin’ him hurt, you understand?”
The structure of the comment rattled Irene. Did Mama assume that Irene was somehow in charge? Is that what Digger told her? If so, did it make sense to correct the record?
“I assure you that I don’t want to get hurt, either,” Irene said. It seemed like a good middle ground. Maybe it was an advance apology. What the hell was she thinking?
She entered the library to find Jonathan standing over an array of weapons splayed out on the plush tea-stained carpet. In addition to the advanced M16 knockoff that she recognized as a CAR-15, she noted an assortment of hand grenades—antipersonnel fragmentation grenades as well as nominally nonlethal flash-bangs—a roll of detonating cord and several electronic gadgets she’d never seen, and whose purpose was unknown to her.
“I understand you’ve been through the training for HRT,” Jonathan said, “so I figure you know most of what you’re looking at.”
An invisible hand pulled a string on her spine, launching a chill. How did he know this? She chose to say nothing, but for the first time in a long while, she realized that she and her Bureau were not necessarily on the top of the intel food chain.
“I see a lot of expensive weaponry,” Irene said. “And I have to tell you up front that if you expect me to pay for all of this, you’ll need to take a payment plan.”
“I do like my toys,” Jonathan said. “But these are on me.”
Irene’s bullshit bell clanged. “Please tell me you didn’t raid an arsenal.”
He smiled. “Hardly. Let’s just say I have means. Here’s the thing, though: You can’t touch any of this with your bare hands.” He handed her two pairs of gloves, one latex and one cotton. “Because of the nature of my day job, I’m invisible. Because of the nature of yours, you might as well walk around with a swarm of paparazzi.”
“There must be ten thousand dollars’ worth of materiel here. Are you telling me that you just do this as a hobby?”
“You’re asking as a curious citizen, right? Not as an FBI agent.”
“Oh, I gave up the high ground as an FBI agent about ten minutes after we met.”
“I’m in the business of right versus wrong,” Jonathan said. “We live in the greatest nation on Earth—and I’ve offered up my life for her on countless occasions—but we let too many bad guys turn the Constitution into a cynical weapon to wield against innocent people. I’ve decided to dedicate my life to leveling the playing field.”
“So your answer is to be a vigilante?”
“You can use a pejorative word if you want,” Jonathan said. She detected a note of agitation. “In my mind, justice is a better one. But the fact remains that you don’t want to have fingerprints, fibers, or DNA associated with any of it.”
Irene waited for the rest.
“We’ll get you coveralls,” Jonathan continued. “At some point, Jennings may recognize you. If that happens, your only route to survival is to lie through your teeth. He’s going to say that you were there in the room when his Constitutional rights were violated, and when you look him in the eye, you’ll need one-hundred-percent credibility when you deny everything.”
Something about the premise excited Irene. She understood that she should have been appalled, but in context, it was damn near exciting. “When do we get started?” she asked.
“We’re waiting for a friend of mine,” Jonathan said. “When he gets here, we can start into the serious planning.”
The friend turned out to be a giant of a man named Brian. The last name was Dutch and she couldn’t begin to pronounce it. Van de Something. He preferred to go by the name of Boxers, whatever that meant. At six-foot-huge, he literally filled the doorway as he entered the library. Unlike a lot of big men, Boxers fit his size and was handsome in his own way. Like Digger, he wore his hair too long, and his beard would have made a Mississippi biker proud. When he spoke, his deep bass voice rumbled the walls.
“This is Irene Rivers,” Jonathan said by way of introduction.
“You’re the FBI lady,” Boxers said. As he shook her hand, his grip, like Jonathan’s before, was surprisingly gentle. “I’m sorry to hear about your little girls. We’ll get them back for you soon.”
“Box is a fellow noncom with the Unit. I’ve known him for years and I trust him with my life.”
“That’s because I’ve saved it so many times,” Boxers said.
“Truer words,” Jonathan said. “She’s coming with us.”
Boxers’ face fell.
“She’s had HRT training,” Jonathan added.
“Have you ever shot anyone?” Boxers asked.
“Please don’t show me the length of your penis,” Irene said. “I can’t possibly compare.”
Laughter burst from Jonathan, even as Boxers turned red. One sentence, issue closed.
“So, what’s the plan?” Boxers asked when Jonathan could breathe normally again.
“Funny you should ask,” Jonathan said. “That’s why I invited you to the party.”
The plan came together quickly, and no plan had ever been simpler at its heart: Snatch and interrogate. Of course there were about a thousand moving parts in the middle, any one of which could derail everything, but Irene chose to stay focused on the goal: seeing Ashley and Kelly smiling back at her, alive and thriving.
Alive.
The alternative to that one word was too terrible to think about.
Jennings lived alone in a small row house in a seedy part of Baltimore, very urban, very working class. The snatch would be the hardest part. To pull that off without alerting the neighbors could be a huge feat on its own. If it went wrong, and someone called the police, her FBI credentials would be of no help. In fact, they might even prove to be a burden. For the plan to work—for it to get past the first step—stealth would be the key. That meant no shots fired, which was easier said than done when you were invading a private residence with guns drawn and safeties off.
It was just a little after midnight when Irene and her two team members glided their blacked-out black van into position in front of Jennings’s row house.
“How sure are you that this is the address?” Jonathan asked.
Irene had spent at least thirty hours of her life combing through this place during the Harrelson case and its aftermath. “One hundred percent,” she said.
“Can you go a little higher?” Boxers asked from the driver’s seat. Jonathan was riding shotgun while Irene occupied the only row of seats behind the front buckets.
“The more pertinent question is whether he’s home,” Irene offered. “On that I have no idea.”
“I can help there,” Jonathan said. He pointed through the windshield. “See that phone booth?” he asked.
It took her a few seconds, but then she got it. It wasn’t a booth so much as it was a platform connected to the side of a building. “Yes.”
“You still have his number?” It was part of the planning research.
“I do.” Irene was already sliding the side door open. Could it really be this simple?
Even at this late hour, the air felt heavy with humidity as Irene walked to the phone. She did her best to ignore the weight and additional heat of her body armor, focusing her mind on the protection it would provide if this turned into a shooting war. When she arrived at the phone, she lifted the receiver and slipped a quarter into the slot. She dialed the 410 area code and number. At this hour, if the line were answered at all, she expected that it would be picked up after at least three or four rings. She was startled, then, when she heard the click after the first ring.
“Hello?”
She’d recognize that voice out of a crowd of ten thousand people.
“Can I speak to Pamela?” She’d dropped her voice a quarter octave and feigned a Southern accent.
A pause.
Oh, shit, he suspects something!
“Who?”
“Pamela,” Irene repeated.
“Who is this?”
She heard suspicion in his voice, maybe a note of panic. “Is this four one oh . . .” She repeated the phone number she’d called with a middle digit transposed.
“Do you know what time it is?” Jennings snapped. “You’ve got a wrong number.”
Click.
Irene closed her eyes and released a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. Thank God. She’d gotten away with it. As she walked back to the van, she gestured with two thumbs up, and the doors opened right away.
“He’s there,” Irene said as she came within earshot. She pulled a stocking cap out of her pocket, fiddled with it till she found the front, and pulled it onto the top of her head.
Neither man said a word, but their body language showed that they were ready for whatever lay ahead. As he slid the door to the van closed, Jonathan handed Irene a Heckler and Koch MP-5 machine pistol. “You’ve used one of these, right?” he asked.
The nine-millimeter mini-assault rifle was a standard armament for the Hostage Rescue Team, but she’d never been particularly enamored of it. Chambered in nine millimeter, the weapon presented a rapid rate of fire, but the small round had a bad record for knock-down capability.
“I’ve used them, yes,” Irene said. She slipped the combat sling over her shoulder.
“If it comes down to a shoot-out,” Jonathan said, “just keep your front sight on the center of mass. If you cut out the core, the rest of the bad guy will fall with it.”
Irene felt a swell of indignant anger. She neither needed nor appreciated marksmanship lessons from an Army grunt.
Irene noted that Jonathan carried a Colt 1911 .45 on his hip, cocked and locked, and that Boxers carried what looked like a derringer against his size, but that she in fact knew to be a standard military-issue Beretta nine-millimeter. They’d given her a choice of sidearm, and she’d chosen a nine-millimeter SIG-Sauer P228 just like the one she trained with every week on the FBI range. Familiarity was key when it came to shooting straight, but she was grateful not to have to worry about ballistics tracing back to her own weapon if someone ended up getting shot.
As she approached the front door to the row house, Irene noted that Jennings had replaced the locks that had been busted up in the original raid, but that otherwise, the façade looked just as worn and weathered as it always had.
“We’re all good on the plan, right?” Jonathan whispered. He pulled the front of his own stocking cap to unfurl the mask that would cover everything except his eyes and his mouth. “There’s nothing subtle about it. We crash in, we snatch the son of a bitch, bag him and bind him, and get the hell out. Time inside shouldn’t be more than a minute.” He looked at Irene. “Big Guy and I have worked a lot together in the past, so we’re going to handle the rough stuff, okay? Rattler, you provide eyes and cover. Yes?”
Irene nodded and pulled her own face mask into place. If a car had been cruising by, the driver would no doubt have been terrified by what he saw. “Yes,” she said. Because of the need for anonymity, Jonathan had given her the code name Rattler. His own was Scorpion, and Boxers’ was Big Guy.
“Good. Let’s go.” He turned to his big friend. “Your turn,” he said.
Irene hadn’t noticed the three-foot thirty-five-pound cylindrical steel battering ram that Boxers carried in his other hand, or that he had likewise blanked out his face. Jonathan stepped aside to leave room while the big man gripped the handles at the front and rear of the ram, squared off perpendicular to the door, and then like a human Da Vinci’s Cradle, swung the plug of steel in a giant underhand arc that contacted the door right at the sweet spot, shattering those shiny new locks and propelling what was left of the splintered door inward on its hinges till it slammed against the wall.
Jonathan squirted through the opening first, followed by Boxers, and together, they streamed up the stairs to the bedroom level, leaving Irene to push the door closed and monitor the first floor, which, in the dim light that streamed in from the street, looked like it might have been burgled. Stuff was strewn everywhere, on the floor, draped over what little furniture there was. When she noticed that the detritus included multiple pizza boxes, complete with leftover pizza still inside, she knew that it was just Jennings being true to form.
Jonathan had been right when he’d warned that there would be nothing subtle about the approach. They sounded like a wrecking crew on the second floor, their heavy footsteps combining with crashing furniture and doors to create a cacophony that rattled the whole structure. Surely, given the age of these homes and the thinness of the walls, they were awakening the neighbors.
But where was the shouting to get down and show hands? Where were the protests from Jennings to be left alone?
He’s down here.
The thought arrived fully formed and devoid of doubt. He’d answered the phone quickly, hadn’t he? That meant he wasn’t yet asleep. It made perfect sense, then, that he would be on the first floor, not on the second. Or maybe the basement.
Shit.
She reached first for the MP5, but then let it go and drew her SIG. She’d fired thousands of rounds through the carbine, but tens of thousands of rounds through the pistol. She assumed a modified Weaver stance, a two-handed grip on the weapon that turned her left side to whatever threat lay out there, and she pivoted her whole body as she scanned the shadows for Jennings. She kept her finger out of the trigger guard even more consciously than usual, knowing that to kill this animal would be to lose track of her daughters.
Ashley and Kelly. Ashley and Kelly.
He wasn’t in the living room and he wasn’t in the center hall. That left either the dining room on the right or the kitchen that lay behind it. The kitchen where all the knives rested in the drawers. The kitchen where—
“Scorpion! The back door!” Irene yelled. “He’s bolting!” Again, no doubt. Irene took off at as close to a run as she could manage through the cluttered dining room, pushing furniture aside and vaulting over even more crap on the floor, as she made her way to the swinging saloon doors that separated the dining room from the kitchen.
She’d spent so much time in this place during the investigation that she felt as if she’d grown up here. She didn’t need additional light to know that the appliances were all an awful shade of brown, or that the wallpaper was an even more awful shade of orange.
Her eyes went right to the back door, which lay wide open. Past the sound of her own labored breathing, she could hear footsteps outside, nearly lost in the thunder of footsteps pounding back down the interior stairs as Scorpion and Big Guy hurried to catch up.
Irene slid to a stop before exposing herself to the outside through the exterior kitchen door, just in case Jennings had found himself a weapon and was lying in wait. Leading with her SIG, she pivoted out onto the stoop and was relieved to find that the Jennings’s head start was not as large as she had feared. She was doubly relieved to find that he’d made a huge mistake.
In a tight chase, when the chasers are limited to their feet as their primary mode of transportation, the smart play was always to run for it. With a thirty- or forty-second head start, it might be smart to try to start the car—or in Jennings’s case, a crotch-rocket Suzuki motorcycle—but with less lead than that, you screw yourself with the time it takes to find keys, get them into the ignition, and accelerate away before your highly motivated pursuers tear you apart.
Irene holstered her weapon even as she ran down the three stairs to the alleyway behind the town house. She was going to do this the old-fashioned way. The satisfying way.
Jennings looked up just seconds before the impact. His eyes looked like billiard balls as he calculated what was coming his way. He hurried to don his motorcycle helmet.
He never came close. The helmet flew five feet as Irene hit him at a dead run, driving her shoulder into the spot just below the juncture of his neck and his breastbone. He barked like a dog as the air was expelled from his lungs, and his arms flailed as Irene’s momentum drove him clear of the bike and back into the rickety fence that separated Jennings’s backyard from the next door neighbors’.
Lights came on next door and a dog barked. Stealth was no longer part of the equation. From here on out, it was about speed, and before Irene could even process the pleasure of beating the crap out of this guy, Big Guy’s beefy hands were on her shoulders, lifting her like she weighed nothing and placing her to the side while Scorpion stepped over the mess and slipped a black hood over Jennings’s head. That done, he rolled the monster onto his stomach and nearly ripped Jennings’s arms out of their sockets as he pulled them behind his back and cinched his wrists together with flex cuffs.
“Let me go!” Jennings yelled. “Help!”
Jonathan kicked him in the ribs, and leveraged him to his feet by lifting his arms.
Jennings yelled again, but after a second kick, he fell silent. He seemed to have gotten the point that quiet was better than noisy.
Irene stepped out of the way as Big Guy took over for Scorpion, hoisting the bound and bagged Barney Jennings over his shoulder like a duffel bag and leading the way back to up the steps, through the house, and out to the waiting van, where he dumped him heavily onto the floorboard.
“Get in and sit on him,” Boxers said. “We’ve got company.” A man and a woman in nightclothes had appeared on the porch of the house next door. They both looked terrified.
As Boxers walked around the front to the driver’s seat and Jonathan sat shotgun, Irene rolled the door shut and literally sat on their prisoner. The sound of sirens rose in the distance.
“That went well,” Boxers said as he eased away from the curb.
“Take it nice and slow,” Jonathan said. “Draw as little attention as possible. We only need a mile and a half.” As he spoke, he pulled off his mask. Boxers did the same, and so did Irene. As long as the bag stayed in place over Jennings’s head, they shouldn’t have to worry about being recognized.
“You know those sirens are for us, right?” Irene asked. “Somebody called the police.”
Jennings shifted under her. “Police?” he said. Muffled by the bag, his voice sounded strained under her weight. “You’re not the police? Who the hell are you?”
Irene bounced on him. Hard. “We’re the beginning of the worst weeks of your life.”
Jonathan turned in his seat to face her. He was smiling.
“You can’t do this!” Jennings protested. “This is kidnapping.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Irene replied.
“But I have rights. You can’t do this.”
She bounced on him again, harder this time. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll do something a lot worse that I don’t have a right to do.”
“Face it, asshole,” Big Guy said from the front. “From here on out, you’re one-hundred-percent victim. Whatever happens to you from here on out—good or bad—is because we make it happen.” A beat. “And if that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, you’re not paying attention.”
“But I didn’t do anything!”
Irene drew her SIG and thumped him on the head with the butt of the grip. “What part of shut up confused you?” It was a solid thump, too, one she was pretty sure had drawn blood.
He shut up.
Jonathan asked, “Assuming that the neighbors called this in as a kidnapping, how long will it take them to get organized enough for road blocks and such?”
Irene had no idea. The Harrelson case was the only one she’d ever worked with Baltimore PD, and their only corner of it was the investigation subsequent to Jennings’s arrest. They seemed professional enough, but there were too many moving parts to even attempt an honest answer to Jonathan’s question.
She decided to fake it. “They’ll have an officer respond to the scene and speak to the caller. If he’s convinced, he’ll call dispatch with a description of the van. Since it’s a kidnapping, they’ll roll a lot of units to it. Once they find out that Assface here is the alleged victim, though, they might just slow to a stroll. I figure we’ve got a good seven to ten minutes before we have to worry too hard.”
“From then or from now?”
“With the two or three minutes we’ve already lost, it’ll be less than seven to ten minutes.”
They got caught by a red light. “Wouldn’t you know?” Jonathan said.
“Tick tock,” Boxers said. “Want me to run it?”
“Negative. If this adventure ends everything for me, it’s not going to be because of a traffic violation.”
As the words cleared Jonathan’s lips the world in front of the windshield filled with Baltimore Police cars. A five-car motorcade of flashing lights and screaming sirens streaked straight at them.
“Ah, shit,” Boxers said. “This isn’t good.”
“Hold fast,” Jonathan said. He’d moderated his tone to something soothing. “We’re just out for a midnight drive.”
“Like they’ll buy that.”
“If we bolt, we’ll have nothing.”
“I concur,” Irene said.
Big Guy gave a sardonic laugh. “Oh, well if you concur, then I feel better.”
The cops were coming really hot, closing the final two blocks that separated them with blistering speed.
“Holy shit,” Jonathan said.
Irene got it and smiled. “They’re not coming for us,” she announced. The lead cop car switched his siren from wail to yelp as he flew past without stopping. “They’re all headed for the crime scene.” As if they’d been listening, the entire parade raced past them and disappeared down the street behind them.
“All right,” Boxers said. “I’ll take that kind of luck.”
“We’ll need to hurry now,” Irene said. “They’ll have noticed our vehicle as they passed. Once word goes out that the bad guys were in a van, they’ll come back in a hurry.”
Jonathan nodded once and smacked the driver on the shoulder. “You heard the lady. Drive fast and take chances.”
“Now you’re sounding like my mother,” Big Guy said. He stomped on the gas, and the van lurched forward, propelling Irene off of Jennings, who responded immediately by clamoring along the floorboards in an effort to find his feet.
Irene found hers faster and settled him down with a savage kick. Honestly, she was aiming at his stomach, but she felt no remorse when her boot found his balls instead. Jennings collapsed with a choking cough. “Oh, my God,” he gasped. He drew his knees up to his chest and crossed his ankles. Without sight, he must have been terrified of whatever the next blow would be.
“Way to go, Rattler,” Big Guy said with a laugh. “Take no shit from anybody.”
Jonathan was laughing, too, but she wasn’t sure she understood why.
“No,” Scorpion said, “Rattler’s not a good enough name. Doesn’t do it for me anymore. We’re going to call you Wolverine. Fast, scrappy, and mean as hell when you’re cornered.”
As if she cared what the hell her handle would be among a team she’d never see again. Just for an added bit of security while Jennings was in a docile state, she zip-tied his crossed ankles.
He said something like, “Oh, God,” she thought, but it was hard to hear through the bag and the gagging.
From the back of the van, cloaked in darkness, it was hard to tell where they were or where they were going. She knew from the planning session that they were headed to a place called Pier Seven, where Scorpion had arranged for a third party to park a helicopter. Given the stakes, they’d driven past the pier and verified the presence of the chopper before they’d raided Jennings’s place. She knew it sat on the harbor, nearly due south of Jennings’s house, amidst some kind of petroleum tank farm, but other than that, she didn’t know enough about the layout of Baltimore to divine a decent idea of how close they were to being out of danger.
Ashley and Kelly.
During the hot part of the op, she had been able to put the plight of her little girls in that locked-up section of her brain where emotion was never allowed. Now the rush of desperation returned. Every moment that passed was a moment when they were separated from her. A moment when they continued to suffer whatever torment this monster had devised for them. Having kicked his balls, now she wanted to cut them off, feed them to him. She bet that that would by God get his attention.
Time had slowed to a stop, even as the world flew by in a blur through the windshield. Irene wished she’d glanced at her watch when this talk of response times had first started. She told herself that it couldn’t possibly have been as long as it seemed, but then she didn’t know whether she could trust what she told herself.
With her prisoner in custody, her die had been cast, her Rubicon crossed. She had committed to a path that would turn her into the kind of felon that she’d sworn to hunt down and remove from society. She’d committed to violating a long line of fast-held principles that had guided her life until now, and at one level, it bothered her that she felt no remorse.
Jennings had earned every bit of what lay ahead for him, first through the abduction of the Harrelson boys, and now—How dare he!—by seeking revenge on her by terrorizing two innocent young girls. In the pantheon of unspeakable punishments, none was painful enough to account for that.
If time crawls by slowly for me, what nightmare must Ashley and Kelly be living?
“Looks like we’re going to make it,” Big Guy said as he swung a tight left turn. “That’s our bird out there on the end of the pier.”
Finally. Through the darkness, Irene hadn’t seen the towering fuel tanks that were so obvious in the satellite images that Scorpion had been able to obtain. As for the helicopter, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know how they’d swung that. The headline here was that the chopper was only a couple of hundred yards away, and when they arrived and got airborne, the first stage of their mission could be hailed as a success.
Pier Seven was literally a pier—a long stretch of wooden planks supported by pilings that stretched far out into the water. The helicopter—it looked like something a police department might fly—sat at the very end, visible only as a chopper-shaped stain against the night. As she took in the geography, Irene realized that they might have just stumbled onto the first major hitch in their planning.
How were they going to get Jennings’s bound body from the van to the end of the pier? What would they do with the van? They couldn’t just leave it out there to be seen. Not only would it be found quickly, but it would also give away the secret of their escape plan. Surely they weren’t going to drive all the way down and all the way back just to have to walk all the way back down again.
She got her answer when Big Guy pulled the van to a stop at the near end of the pier.
“Everybody out,” Jonathan said.
Jennings started to buck again—jerky, spasmodic movements that Irene interpreted as the onset of panic. She was glad that she’d thought to bind his ankles.
“Don’t worry about Assface,” Big Guy said, reading Irene’s thoughts. “I’ll take care of him.” Rather than stepping out the door and walking around, Boxers climbed over and around the engine cowling that separated driver from shotgun. “But if he gives me any trouble, I’ll drop him in the water and see how well he swims with his hands and feet tied.”
Jennings settled down again. Apparently, he’d caught the not-so-subtle subtext. Irene didn’t doubt that Big Guy’s words were more promise than bluff. She’d never met a man who exuded such lethality. Yet he did it without a trace of psychopathy. That couldn’t be easy to do.
Irene moved out of the way to make room for Boxers’ massiveness as he all but filled the van’s cargo area. She slid the side door open and found Jonathan waiting for her just outside.
“Have you got all your kit?” he asked.
Irene patted herself down, running a touch-inventory of her pockets and her weapons. “Yes.”
“Are you sure? The police are going to scour everything.”
“Positive,” she said, though after a buildup like that, how could anyone claim to be positive about anything?
“All right, then. Let’s go.”
Irene hesitated. “We’re not going to help Big Guy?”
“Trust me,” Jonathan said as he turned and led the way down the pier. “More times than not, the last thing Big Guy wants is help.”
It was every bit of seventy-five yards—maybe farther—to the end of the pier. When they were about halfway, Irene dared a look behind and was surprised to see how close Big Guy was, moving quickly and easily despite his size, his gear, and Jennings’s weight slung over his shoulders.
“Do I want to know where you got your hands on a helicopter?” Irene asked Jonathan. “Or how you convinced the owner to park it here and leave it?”
Jonathan flashed one of his smiles at her over his shoulder. “I imagine you do,” he said. “But you’d hate yourself for knowing after you got back to your FBI office.”
Irene caught the meaning. Under the circumstances, there were many details that she was probably better off not knowing.
Arriving at the chopper, Jonathan pulled open the side door—the cargo door. Clearly, he knew that it would be unlocked. He moved without hesitation, indicating to her that whatever accomplices he had were damned reliable.
In the near distance, sirens began to crescendo.
“Hear that?” Jonathan asked.
“They know about the van,” Irene said.
Jonathan nodded. “We’ll make it,” he said. Again, no room for doubt, though she suspected that his confidence was entirely unfounded.
Big Guy arrived ten seconds later and dumped Jennings onto the floor of the aircraft. “You know they’re almost here, right?” he said. No urgency in his voice. If anything, he sounded amused.
Jonathan replied, “If you’d stop strolling and step it up a little, we’d make better time.”
“Kiss my ass, you tiny little man.” Was it possible to utter those words with affection? Because that’s what Irene heard in his tone. These were interesting men.
“You’re next,” Jonathan said, offering Irene a hand to help her inside.
She appreciated the gesture, but she climbed in on her own. She was awash in testosterone as it was; she didn’t see the need to encourage more.
Jonathan stepped in right behind her, and he slammed the side door shut before he settled into a seat.
The only helicopters that Irene had ridden in had been of the bare-bones variety, a step up, she imagined, from Spartan military aircraft, but only a tiny step. This chopper, by contrast, was all about executive comfort, with cream-colored soft leather captain’s chairs for seats, each of which had its own phone. Plush mauve carpeting covered the floors. She started to say something about the luxury, but stopped herself when she realized that such a comment might provide Jennings with an intelligence benchmark that could work against them.
Boxers settled himself into the pilot’s seat—the right-hand front seat—and threw switches seemingly as reflex. Seconds later, the engine started, and seconds after that, the rotors began to whine and turn.
“Hang on, everybody,” Big Guy called over the noise. “When liftoff happens, it’s going to happen fast.”
“Who are you people?” Jennings cried. Literally cried, as in past a sob. “Please don’t do this. I don’t know what this is about, but I swear to God you don’t need to do this.”
“Shut up, Assface.” They all said it in unison.