Once she was bagged and dumped into the van, Anne had been secured by being wrapped in what she imagined was duct tape. They’d sat her up and circled her body, gunnysack and all, several times with tape, making it impossible for her to move her arms. Thankfully, the sack was made of a loosely woven material. She could breathe and even see shadowy forms through the gaps between the threads.
Once they were out of the city, the driver increased their speed, weaving in and out of traffic. Every time he swerved, Anne rolled across the floor of the van and bumped into someone she assumed was the vice president.
The entire time, she wiggled and shifted, trying to work the sack and the tape up her body. It was a slow process and she didn’t know if she was being watched, but she couldn’t do nothing. She thought about the earbud she’d put in her pocket. By now, they were well out of range of the two-way radio. And it didn’t matter because she couldn’t see where they were going.
If she was going to get out of the situation, she had to do it on her own. And she had to do something. She couldn’t stand by and let these people hurt the vice president of the United States.
After a while, a voice sounded from the front of the van. “We’re being followed.”
More promising words could not have been spoken.
Hope swelled in Anne’s heart.
“How did they find us?” someone else said. “Check them. One of them might have a phone or tracking device on them.”
While the van driver increased his speed and swerved between vehicles, the other two men in the vehicle worked over the other captive first.
“You won’t get away with this,” Anne heard the vice president say. “By now they will have launched helicopters. Every law enforcement agency will be on the lookout for you. They’ll set up roadblocks.”
“Shut up.” A loud smack sounded, followed by a grunt.
Anne bunched her legs up and kicked hard at one of the shadows she could see squatting in front of her.
The man fell over, cursed, righted himself and punched her in the side of the head.
Pain knifed through her temple and she saw stars.
“VP’s clean,” a man said.
“Check the woman.”
Something sharp nicked Anne’s arm and the tape around her was cut loose.
With her arms somewhat free, Anne scrambled to shove the gunnysack off her head.
When she managed to free herself, hands reached out and grabbed her from behind. The man wearing the dark suit of a Secret Service agent knelt before her and ran his hands over her body.
Anne kicked at him, landing a heel in his gut.
He grunted, grabbed her ankles and yanked her hard, laying her flat out on the floor of the van, and threw his body over hers. He straddled her hips and continued his search.
The man holding her arms gripped her wrists and pulled them up over her head.
She thrashed and twisted her body, but she was pinned by the weight and strength of her captors.
He found the earbud in her pocket and held it up. “What’s this?”
“It’s my earbud. I use it to listen to music,” she said, praying he wouldn’t take it. If by some slim chance the vehicle following them contained Jack or any member of his team, she could use the communication device to contact them.
“Give it to me.” Terrence Tully, the driver, held out his hand.
The man sitting on her slapped it into the man’s palm.
A moment later, the earbud flew out the window.
Anne’s heart sank, but she refused to give up hope.
“That’s all the electronics I found.”
“Cufflinks?” Tully asked.
“None.”
“Ditch their shoes,” the man holding her wrists said.
The man sitting on her twisted around, yanked off her shoes and handed them to Tully. They flew out the window, as well.
“Lose the tail,” commanded the man sitting on her.
The driver turned sharply, sending the van off the nearest exit.
Anne couldn’t see where they were headed, but the vehicle slowed.
Good. Slow was good. The people following them might have a chance of catching up.
The man sitting on her reached for a roll of duct tape and wrapped it around her ankles.
Though she fought, struggled, bit, kicked and cursed, they sat her up and secured her wrists behind her back. She tried her best to leave a gap between them to give her a chance to work her way out. Alas, they cinched them tightly and shoved her onto the floor.
One of the men sat near the rear of the van, looking out the back window; the other two looked out the front. Rain started falling, slowing them down as they wound through curvy back roads, hydroplaning as puddles built on the road.
“Turn here,” the man who’d moved to the passenger seat said.
The driver cut sharply to the right, slinging Anne over onto her side again.
“I think we lost them,” the man in the back called out.
After another short burst of speed, Tully turned to the left. The new road was bumpier, and water splashed up against the side of the vehicle. Had they turned onto a dirt road?
Again, Anne tried to sit up and look out the window. The rutted road made it difficult. When she finally managed to sit up, she braced her back against the side of the van and stared out at what she could see from the floor of the van.
Tree limbs drooped over the road, brushing against the sides of the vehicle. The rain and the tunnel of greenery blocked out the sun, making it appear dusky outside.
If they’d lost whoever was tailing them, they’d never find them out in the backwoods.
Anne glanced over at the vice president. “Are you okay?” she whispered.
He lay on his side, his wrists and ankles bound much like hers. He nodded. “They will mobilize the military and deploy all the law enforcement agencies.”
The man peering out the back window snorted. “By then, it’ll be too late.”
“What is it you want?” the VP asked.
The dude looking out the back threw a glance toward Anne. “Ask her.”
She frowned. “I’m nobody. What do I have that you could possibly want?” She knew, but she wanted to hear them say it.
The man in the passenger seat turned and snarled at Anna. “A connection to her, the woman who betrayed us.”
“Who are you talking about?” the VP asked.
Passenger-seat guy jerked his head toward Anne. “Ms. Bellamy knows. She’s known all along. If she hadn’t hired someone to look out for her, we’d wouldn’t have had to go to so much trouble.”
Anne dropped all pretense. “For one, I don’t even know who she is. All I know is you are all part of Trinity. And she wanted out. I’ve never even seen her face.”
Passenger-seat man’s hand snaked out and slapped her hard across the cheek. “You lie.”
Anne flinched, her chin going up. “It’s true. She only talks to me via text.”
“You met with her in the movie theater. We almost had her then.”
“You saw more of her than I did,” Anne said. “She was behind me.”
“Doesn’t matter. You are our bargaining chip.”
“Do you really think she’ll hand herself over to you in trade for me?” Anne snorted.
“If not you—” passenger-seat guy tipped his head toward the vice president “—then the VP.”
“Trinity trained her to be ruthless,” Anne argued. “She’s probably halfway across the country by now.”
“That’s not her style,” Tully said. “She’s hung around the DC area for over a year. We just couldn’t catch up to her. She’s a master of disguise and an expert at technology. She wouldn’t have involved you if she didn’t feel like she could save the world.”
“Well, her plan backfired. She didn’t save anyone,” Anne said. “She’ll be long gone.”
“If you hope to live,” the guy in the passenger seat snarled at her, “you better hope she’s not.”
The van lurched to a stop.
“Everyone out,” Tully said.
The two not driving exited the van. One reached in and pulled the VP out, bent forward and threw him over his shoulder. The other man waited until they were out of the way, then reached in for Anne.
She scooted across the van floor, trying to get away.
He grabbed her ankle and yanked her to the edge of the floor and then flung her over his shoulder and marched toward a little white farmhouse that had seen better days. The windows had been boarded up and the front porch drooped as if the posts it was built on had rotted through.
Tully parked the van as far beneath a tree as he could, got out and hurried to the house.
He tried the door handle. When it didn’t open, he cocked his leg and kicked the door hard. It flew open, crashing against the wall inside. The roof over the porch shuddered.
Anne twisted and struggled. With her wrists and ankles bound, she couldn’t do much.
The man carrying her entered the house and dropped her on the floor.
She hit feetfirst but couldn’t get her balance and crumpled to the floor, hitting her hip and then her shoulder. “That’s going to leave a bruise,” she muttered. Bruises were the least of her worries, though. Trinity recruits were trained assassins. From what she’d learned from John Halverson, they were very secretive and didn’t like anyone knowing who they were.
The fact Anne and the VP had seen their faces could be bad news. They didn’t let people live who could recognize them. Another reason to kill their defector.
Even if they got Anne’s informant to agree to trade herself for the release of Anne and the VP, they wouldn’t be good on their word. They’d kill the defector, Anne and the VP, too.
Anne had to find a way out of this mess and get the VP out, as well. She wasn’t ready to die.
She glanced around the room, searching for anything she could use to cut through the tape around her wrists.
Whoever had abandoned the house had left little in the way of furniture. But there was an old wooden crate in one corner and a stack of yellowed newspapers.
After the Trinity assassins dumped their captives, they stepped out onto the porch.
Through the open door, Anne strained to hear what they were saying.
From what she could tell, they were checking for cell phone reception.
“It should be enough to get through to him,” Tully said. He entered the house and stood in front of Anne. “What’s the phone number of your boyfriend?” he demanded.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said, her chin rising. She wished Jack was her boyfriend, but they barely knew each other. Hadn’t she insisted they weren’t obligated to a commitment just because they’d slept together?
Tully pulled a gun from his jacket pocket and pointed it at the VP’s head. “What’s your boyfriend’s phone number?”
Anne struggled to remember, her heart slamming hard against her chest. She told him what she thought it was and held her breath, praying it was correct.
He dialed the number, hit the call button and touched the screen again to put it on speaker. The phone rang once.
“This is Snow.”
Tully smirked at Anne. “Got your girlfriend and the VP. We want to make a deal with you.”
“Are they alive?”
“Yes.”
“I want proof.”
Tully nodded toward the man closest to Anne.
He reached down, grabbed Anne by her hair and yanked her head back.
Tully shoved the phone close to her face. “Say hello to your lover.”
* * *
JACK HELD HIS breath, waiting for the sound of Anne’s voice.
“Jack.” Anne sounded scared but strong.
He let go of the breath lodged in his throat. “Anne, are you okay?”
“We’re fine,” she said. “For now.”
“We’ll find you.” Jack’s free hand clenched into a fist. “And when we do, we’ll kill every last one of the bastards.”
A man laughed on the other end of the connection. “Won’t do you much good to find them, if they’re already dead. Keep your shirt on and get in touch with our traitor. Tell her it’s her for these two. You have one hour before I start shooting. I don’t care who goes first.” His tone grew sharper. “Maybe you do.” Then he ended the call.
“We have to find them,” Jack said.
“They can’t be far. We had them up to the last turn.”
Jack knew they’d found and ditched the tracking device when they’d passed the location of the green dot and the van they’d been following was still way ahead of them.
Then the van had veered off the highway onto an exit and taken to back roads. They’d managed to keep up for several miles. Then the van seemed to disappear.
The fact that it had started raining didn’t help. And the deeper they went into the backwoods, the narrower the roads became and the denser the vegetation. The van could have gone off the road and been swallowed up by trees and bushes.
Arnold had pulled off the highway onto a dirt road and stopped the vehicle.
Jack had nearly come apart. “We can’t stop now. They might be right around the next curve.”
“Or we could have passed them already,” Arnold argued. He got out of the SUV.
“Where are you going?” Jack asked, preparing to take the driver’s seat if Arnold wasn’t willing. “You can’t quit now.”
“I’m not quitting. I’m getting something that will help us get a better view.”
That was when the call had come through.
While Jack had been on the phone with Anne’s captors, Arnold carried what appeared to be a remote-control drone to the front of the SUV. The others had gotten out, as well. Arnold laid the drone in the middle of a dirt road and reached into the back of the SUV for the controls. In less than a minute, he had the drone rising into the air, the images it recorded showing up on the video display.
After the assassin ended the call, Jack leaped out of the SUV and ran to Arnold, who stood staring at the monitor while maneuvering the joystick on the controls.
“See anything yet?” Jack asked.
“Not yet,” Arnold said, his head down, concentrating on the screen in front of him.
“You’d better contact your Trinity informer,” Declan said.
Jack redialed the number of the woman who’d gotten Anne into this mess in the first place, anger and frustration making him want to hit someone. Preferably the people holding Anne hostage.
“Sitrep,” their informer said as she answered.
“They want to make a trade.”
She sighed. “I was afraid it would come down to that. Current location?”
“I don’t know where they are but hang on.” He texted her a pin drop of their location and then got back on the phone. “How soon can you be here?”
“Three minutes, tops. I’d almost caught up with you when you left the highway. Then I lost you.”
“Sounds familiar. We lost the white van we were following, but our guy is looking for it with a drone.”
“Good thinking.”
Two minutes later, a motorcycle pulled up behind the SUV and a woman climbed off, pulled off her helmet and shook out long, auburn hair.
She walked straight up to him and held out her hand. “Jack Snow, I’m CJ Grainger.”
He recognized her voice, even if he didn’t recognize her face. “You got her into this, what are you going to do to get her out of it alive?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“We have less than an hour to figure it out,” Jack said.
“There,” Arnold said. “Do you see that?”
Declan, Mustang, Cole and Mack crowded around the monitor.
“I don’t see anything but treetops and a tin roof,” Declan said.
Arnold pointed to the right of the tin roof at the top of a tree. “See the white angles making corners on the edges of the green tree?”
Jack shoved his way through the men gathered around and stared at what Arnold pointed at. “That could be the van.”
A movement beside the house caught their attention. A man stepped out from beneath the porch and walked to the tree, where he opened what was clearly the door of a vehicle.
“That’s it,” Jack said. “Where are they from here?”
Arnold pulled his phone from his pocket and touched an icon. A map opened up, with a blue dot and a green dot. “We’re the green dot. The blue dot is the location of the drone.” Arnold glanced at Declan. “Drive the SUV. I’ll fly the drone.”
“We can’t go storming in. The Trinity operatives will kill their captives and disappear into the woods,” CJ said.
“We’ll get close and go the rest of the way in by foot,” Jack said.
With that plan in mind, the men piled back into the SUV and followed the directions on Arnold’s phone app.
CJ brought up the rear on her motorcycle.
When they were within half a mile of the location, they pulled the SUV off the road and hid it in the brush. Declan’s Defenders got out. Arnold opened the rear of the SUV and handed them a variety of weapons, including three AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifles with scopes, two 9 mm Glocks, a couple of smoke grenades, a small brick of C-4 plastic explosives and two detonators.
“Are we going to war?” CJ asked.
“We don’t know how many there are of them,” Jack said, as he fitted a full magazine into the pistol he held. “And you’re damn straight we’re going to war. They infiltrated the White House, set off an explosion, and they’re holding Anne and the vice president of the United States hostage. I consider what they’ve done an attack on this country.”
CJ nodded. “Point made.”
Declan stepped forward. “Secret Service, FBI, other agents are aware the VP has been taken. They’ll be searching soon, following leads. My guess is this battle will be joined soon enough by more forces.”
“Are you armed?” Jack asked CJ.
She nodded. “I have what I need. But I thought you would want me to offer myself up in exchange before you go storming in and risk getting them killed.”
Jack shook his head. “Everything we’ve learned about Trinity is that they don’t negotiate, and they don’t let anyone live who might be able to identify them.”
“You’ve got it right,” CJ said. “I’m letting you know now, though, I would willingly let you trade me for the hostages if I thought it would do any good.”
“It won’t,” Declan said and slammed his magazine into the Glock he’d chosen to carry. “Let’s go. We’re wasting time.”
They moved out, slipping through the woods, paralleling the road in to the small farmhouse.
As they neared the house, they stopped and assessed the situation.
Two men stood on the porch.
From what Jack could see, someone was moving around inside. He couldn’t see Anne or the vice president. He assumed the man moving around inside was guarding the two hostages.
Declan held up three fingers.
Jack nodded.
Declan gestured to Mack, who carried one of the AR-15 rifles. He motioned for Mack to cover them.
Mack moved to a better position, dropped to the ground and pointed his rifle at the men on the porch.
Cole held up the C-4 explosives and indicated the van.
Declan nodded and pointed to his watch, then held up five fingers, giving Cole five minutes to set the charges and give them time to get in position.
Which left Mack, Mustang, Declan, CJ and Jack to get in, take down the bad guys and rescue Anne and the vice president.
They circled the house and came at it from the back, where the trees and brush grew closer to the structure.
Jack prayed they were doing the right thing by going on the offensive versus attempting a trade. Either way, someone was going to die that day. And he hoped it wasn’t going to be Anne or the vice president of the United States.