Into the Crossfire

  Sam nodded. “Here. And here.” He tapped two doors on the blueprint, on either side of the front loading bay.

  If the fuckers were at all rational, that’s where they’d be. They had no idea that anyone could be tracking them. Entering into the huge maze of the warehouse made no sense.

  “Jesus, I wish we had a Predator with thermal imaging,” Harry sighed into the earpiece.

  Fuck yeah. An aerial image showing where warm bodies were.

  “Don’t have a Predator,” Mike said, reaching behind him for his backpack. “But while Sam was freaking, I was thinking.” He hauled a camera-like machine with binoculars into the front seat.

  A goddamn handheld thermal imager! And Mike was right—he’d been thinking while Sam was freaking. “I have a thermal imager,” Mike said into the mike, for Harry’s benefit.

  “Sam should kiss you on the mouth for that,” Harry said.

  “Ewww,” Sam and Mike replied in unison.

  Mike smiled evilly. “But I will take that kiss from Nicole once we get her out.”

  “Over my dead body,” Sam growled.

  “Make sure it isn’t over anyone’s dead body, except for the bad guys,” Harry replied over their earpieces. “Now go get them. And afterward, Nicole has to kiss me, too.”

  They were in some kind of abandoned industrial building, but Nicole had no idea where. They could have been on the back side of the moon for all she knew.

  When the car veered into one of the empty compounds, big gate standing open, her heart sank. The driver got out, growled don’t move, pulled out a big black gun and kept it pointed at her. He could see her perfectly, since the headlights bounced off the steel walls of the building, lighting up the inside of the car. Nicole could barely see the man, and followed what he was doing by sound rather than sight.

  The two big steel gates were pulled closed, a chain run through the handles and a padlock on the chain.

  She was locked in.

  The man came to her side of the car, opened the door and pulled her out roughly, pushing her ahead of him.

  They walked around the right-hand corner, the man prodding her painfully in the back with the gun. Along the side wall was a door, ajar, visible in the backwash of the headlights around the corner. The man pushed hard with the gun. The doorway loomed, empty and black and forbidding.

  It was like walking to her doom. They’d driven for ten minutes without seeing a light, without seeing another car or another human being. There was no one around to call for help, no way to signal, no way to call. She and her father were as abandoned as this building.

  There was no way out, none. Even if, by some insane series of events, Nicole managed to overcome two armed men—and there might be more—and run away, she couldn’t. Her father couldn’t walk, she couldn’t carry him and she’d never leave him behind.

  Another sharp jab in the back, hard enough to break skin. Nicole’s heart beat painfully hard as she eyed the open doorway, utter blackness beyond. Something, some animal instinct told her that she and her father wouldn’t escape this building alive. The rusty abandoned warehouse would be their tomb.

  “Get going, bitch.” Behind her, the driver’s voice was low, rough. This time instead of stabbing her in the back with the gun, he gave her a violent push that almost sent her to her knees.

  Slowly, heart thundering, Nicole walked toward the blackness, stumbling over the threshold, then waited. She had no idea where he wanted her to go.

  A heavy hand on her shoulder. “Right,” he rasped and she started walking.

  There was a faint light in the distance that grew brighter as she approached it. A door slightly ajar, light behind it. She stopped outside the door, suddenly terrified of what might be behind it.

  “Move it.” A hard push against the door and she tumbled into the room. What she saw raised the hair on the nape of her neck.

  Her father, duct taped to a chair, hands in restraints clasped on his lap, head hung low, dried blood from the slashed cheek all over the side of his face and his pajamas.

  There was a large plastic sheet under the chair. For the blood. To ensure that no DNA be left behind. A tense shiver of horror ran through her. These men were thorough. They were not going to make mistakes.

  On a stool next to her father was the man who’d broken into her office. A powerful lamp on a nearby steel table provided enough light to see the hellish scene by.

  The man’s head rose at their entrance and Nicole stepped back at the fierce coldness in his eyes.

  She bumped into the man behind her.

  He pushed her forward. “Watch where you’re going, bitch.”

  Nicole barely heard him. Her father—she couldn’t see his chest moving. Oh my God, was he—

  “Daddy?” she whispered out of a tight throat.

  Nicholas Pearce’s eyelids flickered, opened. His head wobbled up, brows furrowed, eyes narrowed, unfocused.

  “Daddy!” Nicole sobbed and he saw her.

  In terrible pain, restraints so tight his hands were white and bloodless, duct taped to a chair by thugs, her father tried to reassure her. He made a stab at a smile and the deep wound in his cheek began sullenly bleeding again.

  “It’s okay, darling,” he whispered. “I’m okay.”

  Pain made her heart miss a beat. She couldn’t stand seeing her father hurt. The room swam as tears flooded Nicole’s eyes. She rushed forward to hold her father, but was abruptly yanked back by a big, strong hand on her arm.

  “Very touching,” the man on the stool said, coolly. “Fatherly love. A daughter’s devotion. It helps me.” He picked up a big gun. Nicole heard a sharp snick! A thousand movies told her it was the safety coming off. He pointed the gun at her father’s knee. “Now. Do you have what I want?”

  Shaking so hard it took her two tries to unzip her purse, Nicole reached in and brought out the portable hard disk.

  Please let this be what he wants, she thought. Otherwise he’d shoot her father in one knee, then the other. She met the man’s eyes, cold, inhuman. The feral eyes of a creature of the night. There was no mercy there at all.

  Still, she tried.

  “Please,” she whispered, and placed the hard disk on the ground with a trembling hand. The man curled his free hand up in the universal gimme gesture. Kneeling still, Nicole sent the hard disk skimming over the floor to him. He stopped it with a booted foot and picked it up.

  He put the gun back down. He could afford to. Her father was tied up in a way a strong man couldn’t break, let alone a weak, very sick one. She was at least ten feet from him. Even if she didn’t have a gun pointed at her back, she’d never be able to make the leap, pick up the gun and shoot. The other man’s hand was a second from the gun and he obviously knew how to use it.

  She had no options here, none. She was helpless, unable to save her father, unable to save herself.

  The man reached behind him, bringing out an ultra-thin laptop. He fired it up. It looked expensive and it was fast. With a couple of beeps, everything was ready. Connecting the hard disk via the USB port, the man stared at the monitor. Nicole couldn’t see anything other than the silver back of the monitor and the blue-green wash of light over the man’s cold, expressionless face.

  “Password,” he grunted.

  “Nickyblue,” she said shakily. Her mother’s nickname for her.

  He clicked his way through something, following intently, while Nicole trembled. Though it was cold in the warehouse, sweat coated her torso, drops falling between her breasts. Terror made her heart pump so hard she thought it would jump out of her chest.

  Utter silence except for the genteel, expensive whir of top-of-the-line electronics, then the man sat back with a sigh. He looked at the other man, next to Nicole. “Got it.”

  “Great,” the man next to her answered.

  “Now.” The intruder stared coldly at Nicole, picking the gun up once more, placing it against her father’s knee again. “Has this information been forwarded? Did you s
end the file to anyone?”

  Nicole had no idea which file he meant, but she hadn’t e-mailed anyone in the past thirty-six hours.

  She shook her head and he nodded. She had no saliva in her mouth to answer.

  The man had the air of someone wrapping something up. It was coming to a head. “Did you copy it to a flash drive?” She shook her head again. “Show me.” His voice was low, harsh, affectless.

  Nicole lowered her purse to the floor and shoved it to him with her foot, as she had with the hard disk. “In the side pocket,” she said, her dry mouth making the words hard to understand.

  He extracted the flash drive, inserted it into the USB port and clicked through it. If it was on the hard disk but not on the flash drive, it must be a file that had arrived on the twenty-eighth or later.

  He nodded and looked her straight in the eyes. She forced herself to meet his gaze. It was like looking into a dark abyss.

  “Swear that you haven’t copied or forwarded the file.” The man pressed his gun hard against her father’s knee. Sweat broke out on her father’s face, but he said nothing.

  “I swear! Please, oh please don’t hurt him!” Nicole cried. Oh God, she couldn’t stand this. Her father was so sick, so fragile. He’d been without pain medication for hours. He was in agony, she could tell.

  Nicole watched the man’s eyes, watched the utter indifference to her father’s pain.

  A flood of rage swept through her. This man was like every cruel man who had ever lived. He enjoyed holding power over others, he enjoyed inflicting pain, simply because he could.

  He looked at her for a full minute. “I believe you,” he finally said, with a nod. “Which means we won’t be needing you anymore.”

  He nodded to his partner and lifted the gun from her father’s knee to place it against his head. In the same instant, Nicole felt the round cold circle of a gun muzzle against the nape of her neck.

  Oh God. This was it.

  She and her father were going to die right here, right now, in a cold, empty, abandoned warehouse with the stench of machine oil and rat droppings in their nostrils, where their bodies might not be found for months. Though, come to think of it, there was the big wide ocean right outside. Weighted down with chains, no one would ever find their bodies.

  Nicole wanted to plead, to ask for mercy, but there was no mercy at all in those light brown eyes, as dead and opaque as marbles.

  “I guess it’s good-bye, Ms. Pearce.” The man’s hand tightened, white showing on the knuckles.

  “No!” she screamed, leaping forward, trying crazily to reach her father, as if she could somehow place herself between the bullet and her father in the time it took the man to pull the trigger.

  She was hauled back brutally by the hair by the other man. He knocked her to her knees and placed his gun against the back of her head again. Crazily, Nicole braced, as if that would help her deflect a bullet.

  She looked over at her father through the tears swimming in her eyes. If she could at least have departed this life looking into his eyes, so they could go together…but his head lay heavily against his chest, unconscious. He’d slip from unconsciousness into death…

  Two shots rang in the room and she cried out. In shock, and then, after a second, surprise. It took her seconds to get her bearings. She was…she was still alive! As was her father, slumped and pale and broken, but alive.

  A pink mist had bloomed around the intruder’s head. He had an expression of utter and total astonishment. He sat on the stool for a long moment, a round pink hole in the center of his forehead. Then, suddenly, as if the weight of the gun against her father’s head were too great to bear, the pistol slipped from his hand, falling to the floor with a clatter. Then he bent forward slowly, finally tumbling to the floor.

  Nicole turned around, heart racing. The man who’d been holding a gun to her head had suddenly disappeared. Just like that, in a second. Shock had her staring at where he’d been, stupidly checking the room. Finally, she looked down and there he was, sprawled on the filthy concrete floor, a pool of red flowing from his head, gun still in his hand.

  None of this made any sense.

  Two figures stepped forward from the doorway, appearing out of the utter darkness like ghosts. Strong, substantial ghosts, hard-eyed and carrying rifles…

  Nicole simply sat there, completely incapable of processing any of this, shaking, mind blank. Her entire body felt heavy with the lethargy of shock.

  “Honey,” one of the ghosts said, and it was as if that deep voice shattered the chains of shock holding her in place.

  Sam! Sam and Mike!

  Somehow they’d found her! She drew in a shuddering breath and only then realized that she had stopped breathing. A second later, she still found it hard to breathe, because Sam was holding her so hard.

  “Jesus,” he muttered into her hair. “That was close.”

  “Yeah.” She laughed shakily. “What took you so long?”

  He made a sound deep in his chest. Not a laugh, not a snort, but a combination of the two.

  Just feeling him against her, knowing he was there, made her strong. Awareness rushed back in. The men who had threatened her were dead, but her father needed medical care and she had to figure out what was in her computer because there was no guarantee that other bad men might not follow.

  Nicole pulled Sam’s head down, kissed him, then pushed against his chest, hard. Surprised, he opened his arms to let her go. She turned to Mike, gave him a resounding kiss on the mouth, then ran to her father.

  “Hey!” Sam shouted.

  “Harry wants one of those, too,” Mike called out.

  The intruder was sprawled at her father’s feet, hand still curled around his gun, finger in the trigger guard. A second later, and a bullet would have gone through her father’s head.

  Nicole stared down at the man for a moment, hating him with every fiber of her being. She kicked his arm away with disdain and knelt next to her father, frantically touching him all over.

  “Daddy, Daddy, are you okay?” She tugged desperately at the duct tape. She couldn’t stand seeing him tied up for one second more. But no matter how frantically she pulled, the tape held. Her father swayed in his seat as she tugged harder and sobbed. “Damn it! I can’t get this stuff off him!” she raged.

  Big hands pulled her gently away. “Here honey, let me,” Sam said, pulling out one of those huge black knives she so wanted for herself.

  Nicole eyed the man at her feet. “Too bad he’s dead. I’d love to cut his beating heart out with that knife.”

  “Beautiful and bloodthirsty, I like it,” Sam said, slicing easily through the duct tape, one big hand on her father’s shoulder so he wouldn’t fall off the chair. “Though it’s not as easy as it looks, getting past the ribs to the heart.” He sliced the restraints around the wrists and slipped the knife back into a sheath around his thigh.

  “Oh God.” Nicole looked up at Sam, tears swimming in her eyes. “He’s unconscious. We’ve got to get him to a hospital immediately!”

  “Yeah.” Sam bent and lifted her father carefully in his arms. “We can drive him as fast as any ambulance. St. Jude’s is about twenty minutes away. Let’s get going.”

  “I’ll drive,” Mike said. He looked down at the dead bodies, then at Sam. “I’ll have to call this in.”

  “From the road,” Sam answered, turning sideways to get through the door with her father in his arms. “We don’t have time right now. Let’s move.”

  Nicole scrambled to her feet, light-headed, still shocked at not being dead, and followed them out the door. Mike held a powerful flashlight to light the way.

  She was halfway down the corridor when she stopped, cursing. Nearly dying had scrambled her brains. She ran back to the room that had almost been her graveyard, leaping over the man who’d nearly blown a hole in her head, and grabbed the intruder’s laptop, her hard disk and her purse.

  Mike was waiting for her, a question in his eyes.

&
nbsp; “Whatever they were looking for, they were willing to commit murder to get it,” she huffed, holding the laptop and hard disk up. “We need to find out what it is. What?” He was looking at her strangely.

  They were walking quickly down the corridor, trying to catch up with Sam, who was already at the big steel gates.

  “Should have thought of that myself,” Mike grumbled. “Couldn’t count on Sam to think of it, he was crazy with worry over you, but sh—damn! I should have thought of that. Here, let me carry that for you.”

  He looked weighed down by about a thousand pounds of…stuff. Nicole didn’t recognize any of it except for a big black rifle, a big black pistol and a big black knife.

  She could certainly carry a laptop, a purse and a small hard disk.

  “No, that’s fine. I’ve got it. You just saved my life,” Nicole said as they exited out onto the dark loading apron. “You can be forgiven for forgetting things.”

  “Do your thing, Sam,” Mike said, holding out his arms.

  Sam gently transferred her father to Mike’s strong arms and pulled something small out of a side pocket. Two seconds later, he’d picked the padlock and was pulling the chains out of the handles. He pulled out the big steel gates just enough for them to slip through.

  “How’d you guys get in?” Nicole looked around for an alternative route they could have used, but couldn’t find one. “Rappelled,” Sam said succinctly, directing the flashlight for a moment over to the right. Two slender ropes hung down, swaying gently in the chill night air coming off the ocean.

  They followed Mike out the big gate and around a corner. He was carefully laying her father down on the back seat of a big SUV. Nicole rounded the vehicle, gently lifted her father’s head, slid in, then placed his head on her lap. She stroked his face, carefully, because she didn’t want the deep slash to start bleeding again. Her heart squeezed with sorrow as she felt the loose skin over bone, the crepe-like texture of his skin. His eyes were sunken deep in their sockets. What was lying on her lap looked more like a skull than the head of a man.