Impulse

  Marius climbed out of the car and held the door for me. I hesitated. Inside the car Tara cried out as Calvin did something.

  Right. I climbed in.

  “All the way across,” Marius said.

  I slid over until I was behind Jason, directly in front of Calvin.

  “Put on the seatbelt,” said Jason. He’d twisted his head slightly and I could see the sunglasses in the rearview mirror.

  I felt Calvin’s gun press against the back of my head and I nearly jumped away.

  I took a deep breath and put the seatbelt on.

  Marius shut the door and I saw him move briskly across the front of the car, then dash through a gap in the traffic, over to the coffee shop.

  “Phone,” said Jason reaching his hand back.

  “Give it,” Calvin said. He tapped my head suggestively with the business end of the gun.

  I took Joe’s phone out of the chest pocket and dropped it in Jason’s hand. He glanced at it, then tossed it in the front passenger seat.

  Marius was back in a minute, climbing into the backseat across from me. “Not upstairs or downstairs, and not in the restroom.”

  Jason grunted, then pulled out into a gap in the traffic.

  * * *

  “What do you want?”

  Jason hung a left almost immediately, heading back through the oil field service companies.

  I asked again and he said, “Shut up.” He reached over into the passenger seat and flipped a plastic bag back to Marius. “Her hands.” The bag held foot-long nylon cable ties.

  Marius grabbed my nearest wrist and snaked a tie around it, pulling it snug. “Give me your other hand.”

  “Around the shoulder belt, or under?” I said. “You want me locked to the vehicle?” Hostages or not, I was going to jump away if they attempted to secure me to the entire car.

  Marius looked at Jason. “Don’t lock her to the seatbelt,” he said.

  I tried not to sigh with relief and snaked my left hand under the shoulder belt.

  Marius threaded a second tie through the one around my right wrist and snugged my left wrist into my right. He let me settle back but then reached into his jacket and pulled out another blocky automatic, twin to Calvin’s.

  I wriggled my fingers, checking the circulation.

  For a moment I thought Jason was headed for the garage/clubhouse, but he turned away from that side of town and went south, winding down through the lower foothills below town. Was he taking us out to the desert?

  Instead, he turned in at the county airport, a small general-aviation facility for private planes. It had a single runway, some T-hangars, and larger maintenance hangars by the fixed-base operator’s fueling station.

  Flying us someplace?

  He paralleled the runway, moving away from the hangars, and pulled the Hummer up to a warehouse outside the airstrip’s security fence. He clicked a box clipped to his visor and a garage-style door slid up. He drove the Hummer inside.

  There were no other vehicles. There were overhead skylights but the sun was low and, when the door closed behind, it was significantly darker within.

  “Wait,” Jason said, taking off his sunglasses. He got out and walked through a door in the far wall.

  I considered moving then but the numbers still weren’t right. I couldn’t jump both Jade and Tara out at once, not with my hands bound. I couldn’t get Calvin and Marius. I wanted to call Dad again. Even if he was still out of range, at least I could update our location, but Marius was watching me, the gun resting in his lap.

  Jason came back through the far door, and opened my car door. He reached across and undid my seatbelt. “You give me any trouble, and I’m gonna come back in here and have a little party with your friends. And after a while, when they wish they was dead, we’ll take care of that, too.”

  In the back, Tara began crying softly.

  Jason looked at me to see if I’d heard him. With his sunglasses off I could see four teardrops tattooed below his right eye. He had a scar running through his left eyebrow, across his upper eyelid, and then continuing on his left cheekbone.

  “It goes without sayin’ that I will also mess you up.”

  I kept my face still and avoided his eyes.

  He pulled me out of the car, his hand gripping my upper arm. “Come on.” He walked me to the far door, pushed it open, and pulled me through.

  There were no skylights or lights in the far room. A bit of reddish sunlight outlined a window mostly blocked by closed blinds, but my eyes weren’t adjusted. I never saw the loop of wire that dropped over my head and cinched tight around my neck.

  Oh, shit.

  I froze. Someone had one hand against my spine, right below the wire, holding me away. I raised my bound hands toward my throat and a man’s voice said, “Don’t.” The loop tightened enough to bite into my neck. He pulled me back and to the side, so his back was against the wall to the right of the door, I guess so nobody could come up behind him.

  I dropped my hands.

  Someone adjusted the blinds, letting the setting sun shine into the room and I winced and narrowed my eyes.

  A woman, silhouetted against the window, said, “That’s better, we can—” She stopped and took several steps closer, moving to one side to avoid blocking the light.

  As my eyes adjusted I could see that she was an older woman wearing a business suit and a long red wool coat. Her graying hair was pulled back so tightly that I thought it was altering the shape of her eyebrows. She was staring at me intently.

  “Oh, my,” the woman said, “aren’t you just the spitting image of your mother?”

  Oh.

  I’d seen her picture. Mom had shown it to me in our living room. This was the woman who’d held Dad captive for months, who had killed his NSA handler, who had escaped from prison.

  Hyacinth Pope.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Millie: “Mayday”

  Millie got the message first. She’d been dealing with some e-mail correspondence and working at her desk in the Yukon cabin when she wasn’t downloading (Ontario) or uploading (Lisbon). But she’d popped into the house to see what was in that freezer before deciding what to make for supper.

  Her phone made its alert chirp. She glanced at it and saw that there was a voice mail. She wondered if Joe had asked Cent out to dinner, but her stomach clenched when she heard the tension in Cent’s voice.

  “Mayday. It’s local trouble. Gang related. They’ve got Tara and Jade. We’re at Krakatoa, but not for long. They’re driving a black H3 Hummer with chrome spinner wheels and a custom plate: numeral 2, K, O, O, L, numeral 4, U. Too cool for you. I’m about to be in a ‘great’ situation. I’m cooperating until I can get Tara and Jade away. Could really use a hand. I’ll try to update my location when it changes.”

  She jumped to the coffee shop immediately, downstairs, in plain site of everyone.

  A woman fell away from her, gasping. “Jesus! Where did you come from?” A man turned around and helped the woman up off her knees. Other people looked up from their tables but at the noise, not her arrival.

  “Sorry. My fault.”

  Millie scanned the downstairs, then went to the window and looked outside for the Hummer. There was a large black SUV parked across the street, but it wasn’t a Hummer and it didn’t have chrome wheels.

  She ran up the narrow flight of stairs to the balcony. There was nobody up there, but the table by the railing had cups, a backpack, and sheet of paper on it. She stepped closer and recognized the handwriting. The backpack was Cent’s.

  She jumped back to the Yukon, took a framed photo of Cent off her desk, jumped back to the balcony, and ran down the stairs to the baristas.

  “Have you seen this girl today?”

  “We see her every day. She ran out about ten minutes ago. I went upstairs to bus the tables and saw that she left her backpack, so she’s probably coming back in a minute.”

  “I’m her mom. If she shows back up, tell her I took her backpack,
okay?”

  “Thought so. You guys really look alike.”

  Millie nodded and ran back up the stairs. She scooped up the papers, grabbed the backpack, and went toward the back of the balcony where the head of the stairway was. When the balcony blocked her from the view of the people below, she jumped back to the house.

  “Davy!” she yelled, on the odd chance he was there, but there was no answer. She set her phone on the counter so it would it stay in the network, and jumped back to the cabin.

  Davy wasn’t there, either. He’d told her he was going to do some more surveillance of the Stroller and Associates compound in Costa Rica. Though Millie had a jump site for the beach town of Santa Teresa on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, she had nothing for San José in general, or the area where the compound was, northwest of the city.

  There was a whiteboard in the kitchen where they wrote grocery lists and left messages to each other. She grabbed a handful of paper towels, wiped the central section clear, and wrote, Mayday @ New Prospect House!!!

  She jumped back to the house in time to see Davy calmly lift his cell phone to his ear. “Got a voice mail.”

  On the chance it was more information—hopefully an updated location—she didn’t say anything. She watched his face go from relaxed to tense and wide-eyed. He opened his mouth to speak and she held up her hand sharply, then ticked the info off on her fingers, staccato like.

  “Hummer. Chrome wheels. Too cool for you. Krakatoa. They’ve got Jade and Tara. I’ve already been to the coffee shop. She left about twelve minutes ago. Anything else? Did she call with a new location?”

  He shook his head, but was doing something with his phone.

  “If you call her they’ll take her phone. Going to call the police?”

  “I’m getting her location.”

  “How?”

  “I put an app on her phone. If I text a code word to the phone, it texts back a map link and coordinates. If the phone is moving, it shows the direction and speed as well.” He exhaled. “It will take a minute.” Then he muttered, “If her phone is still in the county.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to talk about spying on his daughter, but considering the circumstances, she was really just grateful. She considered his clothes. He was dressed in tropicals, for Costa Rica. “I’ll get your coat,” she said.

  She jumped to the cabin and grabbed their medium-weight coats—not the heavy parkas they used in the Yukon, but something good for winter in New Prospect.

  He was still staring at the phone.

  “Let’s go to the car,” she said. “Unless they just happen to be at one of our jump sites.…”

  He nodded and vanished. She jumped to the garage and found him opening the passenger-side door. His phone chirped and he said, “Good. Got the map link. It’ll take a minute to load.”

  The car was out on the road when he said, “South, but still moving.”

  “To the interstate?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’re not moving fast enough to be on the state road. More one of these little guys west of the state road.” He tilted the phone to show her.

  She stepped on the accelerator and headed down Thunderbird Road at twice the posted speed limit, keeping her eye open for pedestrians, cars, and patches of ice.

  Davy kept his eye glued to the phone, texting the code word again. In a carefully mild voice he said, “If you crash the car, we won’t be able to get to her, even if we jump out of the car before impact.”

  Millie snarled, “Find her! Leave the driving to me.”

  She took the next right, a commercial road running in the right direction, and ran two yellow lights in succession.

  “The airport. Looks like they’re headed for the airport.”

  “We have an airport?”

  “Private, I guess, but they could still fly her out.”

  She ran a red light fifty feet in front of a cross bound semi. The driver honked angrily, but the truck was already far behind.

  Davy didn’t say anything.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “What were you thinking?”

  With the loop of wire securely around my neck, Jason let go of my arm. “So, this is the one? The boys said it was someone bigger.”

  Hyacinth glanced at him and then back at me. “Probably her father, though the flying stuff is new. I have my doubts about that.”

  Jason snorted. “Yeah. Crazy stuff. But I can tell Dmitri you got what you wanted?”

  Hyacinth nodded. “So far. The finder’s fee will be paid. But don’t go away. She’s only the start.”

  Jason frowned. “Dmitri didn’t say anything about more.”

  Hyacinth smiled. “Call him. Tell him to talk to Mr. Fowler. There will be compensation.”

  “Huh.” Jason took out his phone and stepped out the door, closing it behind him.

  There was a moan from the corner and I tried to turn my head.

  “Don’t!” the man behind me said, tightening the wire.

  Hyacinth pulled something from her coat pocket, but I couldn’t even see it until she tilted it and it caught the light.

  “Steel guitar strings. Very strong. Very thin. Available everywhere. These are D strings. A great compromise between strength and cutting.” She smiled. “I don’t know if you can do what your father can, but try it and you’ve got a good chance of leaving your head behind. Okay, so it may not be complete decapitation, but it will, at the very least, crush your larynx and cut your carotid arteries.”

  She walked closer. “Let’s say you can’t jump. If your dad or mom grabs you and tries to jump away, the result is going to be the same.” She flipped a switch by the door and overhead fluorescents came on. “You wanted to see who was moaning?”

  Caffeine was in the corner, though it took me a moment to recognize her. It was her voice, whimpering when the light went on, that let me identify her. I couldn’t tell from my usual clue, her black roots, ’cause there was enough blood in her hair that I had trouble even seeing the blonde part. She was duct taped to a metal folding chair. Where her face wasn’t bloody, it was purple.

  “Why’d you do that?” I blurted out.

  “You think we did that?” Hyacinth shook her head. “No, no. This was Jason’s work. Apparently he has a very strict no-termination policy. Caffeine wanted to quit her employment. She was in this condition when Jenkins and I arrived.”

  The man behind me sighed and said, “No names.”

  Hyacinth shrugged. “Right. Sorry.” She walked over to Caffeine. “Now, the young lady was very responsive to our questions. She doesn’t know if you can jump or not, but she did talk about some specific encounters that make me suspicious.” She narrowed her eyes. “But you aren’t the big man they said took them to the pit.”

  She walked back to me. “It wasn’t the reports of teleporting that got me here so fast. My, umm, employers have offered that reward for info for years. They’ve gotten reports from everywhere, from all sorts of gangs and syndicates and cartels. It’s the drugs, I think. People sell drugs, they do drugs. They see things. We kept following leads and they came to nothing.”

  She leaned closer, studying my face some more. “It’s really uncanny. You’re almost like a clone of her. Except the nose.”

  I’ve got my father’s nose.

  “We scrambled the jet when we heard the description of the pit. No one has ever described that before. That got my attention.” She gestured toward the other room. “When the boys talked about being dropped into the water,” she shuddered, “that struck a chord. Your dad is very fond of that one.”

  It runs in the family.

  “So, can you jump?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She raised her hand like she was going to hit me.

  I ignored her hand and looked at her eyes.

  Her raised hand visibly shook, like she was restraining herself. She shook her head, and lowered the hand, then reached into her coat and pulled a zippered nylon case from
an inside pocket. When she opened it, I saw capped hypodermic needles and drug vials.

  Oh, shit.

  “We’ll find out, soon enough. We learned a lot from your father, but he pulled that trick at the end, with the water. They didn’t see that coming.”

  She took the cap off one of the hypodermics, inverted a vial, and stabbed up through the membrane in the cap. “Can you do anything special like that?”

  You will not use me to control my parents, I thought. Even if it kills me.

  I said, “Just watch, Miss Minchin.”

  She froze, her mouth open, her eyes slightly wider.

  I jumped in place, adding twenty miles an hour velocity, straight back into Jenkins, the man holding the wire. Sheetrock exploded around us as we slammed through the wall, then tumbled across the floor of the main warehouse.

  My back screamed where his hand had been pushing against my spine, but I could move. When I rolled over and pushed up onto my hands and knees, the wire was not tight across my neck.

  I clawed at it with my still-bound hands and the loop loosened enough that I could pull it over my head. I flung it away from me and its wooden handle clattered across the floor. Jenkins was sprawled in scraps of Sheetrock, unmoving. His left forearm bent unnaturally, like he had an extra elbow.

  Hyacinth was staring through the gap in the wall, then she charged forward, ducking through it, the hypodermic held in her hand like a dagger, thumb poised on the plunger.

  You’re too late, Miss Minchin.

  I dropped forward onto my elbows and, as she approached, jumped in place, adding a modest ten miles per hour toward her. My hip slammed into her shins and she flipped over onto the concrete floor, arms first, followed by her head. Almost like an afterthought, I heard the hypodermic syringe smash against one of the loading-bay doors at the far end of the room.

  I stared back at her, looking for any movement, but she was as still as Jenkins. I considered the possibility that she’d broken her neck.

  Then I tried to get up and considered the possibility that I’d broken my neck.

  I hurt. My back hurt. When I lifted both hands to touch my neck it stung, and when I looked at my fingertips, they were bloody. The wire had cut me, but obviously not fatally. There was a lump on the back of my head where it had connected with Jenkins jaw.