Into the Fire (50 page)

Since leaving her stepfather’s dictatorship, Eden hadn’t spent a lot of time going to church. Despite that, while living in LA, she’d discovered that there
were
Christians who believed in something other than smiting sinners, repentance, and fearful avoidance of hellfire. If only one sect was real and true, however, she suspected it was the church on Santa Monica Boulevard that flew a rainbow flag and warmly welcomed all through its always-open doors.

Still she’d rejected all religion. She’d lived long enough to know that there was no God—there couldn’t possibly be. There were just random acts of violence that, if you were lucky, you avoided or survived.

And Eden was working hard to survive this one. Since she’d also lived long enough to recognize crazy when she saw it, she chose not to mention that her Jewish grandmother had died of breast cancer, which had left her part-Cherokee grandfather battling alcoholism and depression for the rest of his life.

Like everything else she’d told her captives so far, she lied, making it all up as she went along. Meanwhile, she asked questions of her own—in hopes of finding out where they’d taken Sophia, Hannah, and Tess, and while constantly watching and waiting for an opportunity to escape.

Although where she’d go if she did make it out of this building, she had no clue. They’d arrived via a helicopter that had immediately flown away, and although Eden had been busy, pretending to have gone into labor, she’d caught a peek or two through the windows during their descent. All she’d seen for miles in every direction were tree-covered mountains.

“
When
is your due date?”

The crazy lady had put some kind of monitor across Eden’s belly, to register the time and strength of the contractions that she’d told her captors she was having—another lie. To her surprise, there was actually something to register. But okay. Back when Eden was twelve, her cousin had gone to the hospital ten different times before her baby was finally born—she’d had a series of practice contractions that she’d mistaken for the real deal.

That was surely what was happening to Eden now.

Which was just as good, since she was sticking to the story she’d told back at the cabin—that Pinkie was due any minute. It had worked to her advantage this far—she’d kept the man with the beard and the let-the-good-times-roll Louisiana accent from injecting her with whatever drug had made both Hannah and Sophia sag. She’d implored him, saying that no matter what kind of grudge he held, he couldn’t possibly want to risk the life of an innocent, unborn child. And, to her surprise, he’d actually agreed.

Instead, he’d trussed her up good and tossed her into the back of a cargo van with Tess, Sophia, and Hannah. All of whom were out cold.

“Are you a nurse?” Eden finally asked the walking health questionnaire, hoping there was something—even just Tylenol—that she could take for her painful back.

“No.” The woman frowned as she adjusted the belt that went across Eden’s stomach. “This is supposed to pick up the heartbeat.”

“It’s probably broken,” Eden said, pushing her hands away. The entire machine looked ancient. “Don’t you have an ultrasound? And if you’re not a nurse, then who—”

“I’m the baby’s mother,” the woman told her.

“Excuse me?” Eden said.

“When the doctor gets here, he’ll perform a C-section and give the baby to me, so you can be punished with your friends.”

“What?” A rush of fear made Eden’s back hot with pain. “Oh!”

“That was a big one,” the woman reported, checking the machine. “Maybe all he’d do is induce. Assuming that God hasn’t already punished you by killing the child.”

“There’s no heartbeat,” Eden said testily, her hands on a stomach that oddly felt bowling ball tight, “because the machine is broken.” Come on, Pinkie, kick. But he didn’t move. She would have thought that the squeezing from the practice contractions would’ve woken him up—made him do his usual flips and spins.

The woman took a stethoscope, put in the ear pieces, and pressed the end to Eden’s belly.

“Get away from me,” Eden said.

“Shhh!”

“No!”

The door to the room opened, and the woman immediately backed off, pulling the stethoscope from her ears as the bearded man came back in. He was followed by three men with machine guns—including Adolf, the guard Eden had befriended, so to speak, in the back of the van.

Although how a boy—and he really was just a boy—could have turned eighteen without realizing how bizarre it was that his parents had named him after a mass-murdering fascist dictator, Eden did not know. Jug-eared and nerdly, he was the kind of boy that girls wouldn’t bother to talk to—so she’d quickly remedied that.

She’d further won his sympathy by telling him that her husband—the baby’s fictional father—had died while fighting in Iraq.

And she’d let him pitch her the idea of joining the Freedom Network. Thanks to years of being lectured by her stepfather, and by Danny, too, Eden knew how to sit through it not just without pissing off Little Hitler, but by making him believe she was actually listening and engaged.

The van ride to the helicopter hadn’t been as long as she’d expected, but she’d had enough time to worm a whispered promise out of him—“I won’t let anyone hurt your friends.” And sure enough, someone had bandaged Tess’s bullet wounds while in the air—at Adolf’s pink-cheeked but gutsy insistence.

And when they landed and more guards came to take them off the helicopter, when Sophia, Tess, and Hannah had been taken to a different building than Eden, Adolf had caught her eye, nodded, and then gone with them.

The creepy woman now bowed her head in submission to the bearded man, who announced, “The doctor’s been delayed, but I need this one, now, with the others.”

This one being Eden.

“Of course, Captain,” the woman said, and when she turned to lower the rail on the bed, she whispered to Eden, “Your baby’s already dead.”

“I’m going to tell Reed yes, that I’ll do it,” Murphy said, as Dave let his team—which included a pair of pissed-off Navy SEALs—help him brainstorm their next move. “But not in Dalton.”

Outside, a group of FBI agents who looked like middle-aged moms appeared to be cooking an open-fire dinner. They were, in reality, standing guard and watching the campsite’s perimeter, no doubt ready to offer home-baked cookies to any Freedom Network patrols that might stumble past, to keep their true kickass nature concealed.

Meanwhile, in the tent, Lindsey had taken on the task that Tess Bailey usually performed at the computer. Dave was well aware that sitting still wasn’t one of Lindsey’s strengths, but someone had to be in computer contact with Jules Cassidy and the FBI.

Neither Dave nor Murphy nor Cassidy himself wanted the FBI to be directly involved with the rescue operation, so they were treading the tightrope of bureaucracy in their communications, even knowing it could well come back and slap them on the asses, should something go horribly wrong.

Cassidy was coming through huge, though, and Lindsey reported that they’d received voice match info from that first phone call. The man with the thick accent who’d spoken to Murphy was Craig Reed, the Freedom Network’s security chief and Tim Ebersole’s former right-hand man.

Lindsey had rattled off the contents of Reed’s file—his unremarkable educational record, a short list of priors, info about his dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Army due to his part in the cover-up of a hate-crime against an American mosque—a deadly fire in which a little boy had been killed, perpetrated by two men under his command. Reed had served time, and met one of Ebersole’s fervent disciples in prison. The rest, including his callous public comment about the dead child—
The only thing I know for sure about the boy is that now he’ll never have the chance to become a terrorist
—was history.

“I’m going to tell Reed,” Murphy continued now, “that I’ve put out some feelers and that my connections tell me that a special delivery was made to the Freedom Network compound, via chopper, and that I know he’s holding Hannah and the others there. So I’m coming to them.”

“By the way,” Lindsey interjected. “We just got a report from the FBI that the helicopter that flew into the compound left almost immediately after discharging its passengers. They’ve tracked it back to the Dalton area—the pilot and owner is a card-carrying Freedom Network member. There was no one else on the aircraft when he landed.”

“I don’t get it,” Izzy Zanella said. “I’m Tim Ebersole. I faked my death, but now there’s a chance I’ve been exposed—pun intended. Why didn’t I get out of Dodge on that helo? Why aren’t I halfway to Mexico by now?”

“Because
Dodge
is the safest place in the world for Ebersole, right now,” Dave finally spoke up. “Even with a warrant, everyone knows that the FBI’s not going into that compound. Imagine if they tried. Instant and ongoing publicity for the Network.
FBI Holds Freedom Network Members Captive—Day Two Hundred and Twelve.
Can’t you just see those headlines?”

He glanced at his watch. They had nine more minutes before the proof of life phone call—assuming that Sophia and the others were all still alive. Which was something he absolutely had to believe, in order to keep from driving one of their trucks right through the fence and single-handedly wiping those murderous lunatics off the face of the earth.

“Can we stay on topic?” Dave’s request was as much for himself as the others. He turned back to Murphy. “At the end of this phone call, Reed’s going to say,
You’ve had your proof of life. Do it in Dalton and do it now.”

“Then you say
fuck no,
” Izzy answered for him, with all the certainty and conviction of a twenty-something Navy SEAL. “You tell him that you don’t have long to talk, that you need a number so that you can call
him
back—”

Gillman interrupted with his usual belligerence—apparently it wasn’t reserved purely for Dave. “Yeah, like he’s going to give Murphy—”

“Maybe he will,” Izzy spoke over him. “The point is to ask for more than you think you’ll get. The Freedom Network’s watching their entire future flush down the drain, right here, right now. Taking hostages was a last ditch, hail-Mary move if I’ve ever seen one. We’ve got the power. Tell
them
how it’s going to go down. And for fuck’s sake, buy us enough time for the sun to set so we can get in there and get our people out.”

Murphy nodded. “I will,” he said. “I’m going to tell Reed it’s going to take me five hours to get out to the compound, but once I get there? I’ll confess. Right at the gate, in front of their surveillance cameras.
After
I see him let Hannah and the others go.”

Lindsey shook her head. “He’s never going to agree to that,” she said.

“He might.” Izzy looked the way Dave felt—as though if he had to sit here talking about this much longer, he was going to jump clear out of his skin.

“If he does,” Lindsey was certain, “he’s bullshitting us. Think about it. The Freedom Network lets Hannah go, Murphy confesses to everything, including doctoring those photos, and then removes himself—permanently—from all future questioning. But hey, Hannah’s still in the mix, willing to testify in court that she was the one who took the pictures—just a few days ago. Not to mention the fact that all four of the hostages were taken at gunpoint, and that Tess was
shot…
It’ll be obvious that Murphy’s confession was made under duress, and suddenly there’s a fraud investigation underway and a major delay in getting their five mill. Trust me, they are
not
going to let Hannah go.”

“They don’t have to
do
it,” Dave pointed out. “They just have to say that they will.”

Lindsey was still shaking her head. “We have to give Reed a way to think that he can still win—otherwise he’s going to dig in his heels and push his
do it now
agenda.”

Murphy nodded, clearly on the same page. “A car,” he said, and Lindsey nodded. “I’ll demand a car. I’ll say it’s so the women can drive out of the compound and get to safety.”

“And he’ll agree to it,” Lindsey added for those of them who hadn’t quite figured it out, “because he can fill the trunk with fertilizer, make a bubba bomb and blow the car to pieces after Murphy’s dead. When the FBI comes running to investigate the blast, the Freedom Network can claim the bomb was yours, Murph—that you blew them up, then killed yourself. Reed’ll probably wave around the fact that Hannah was on the Freedom Network member roster—like you found out she was some kind of double agent and killed her for betraying you. The others were in the wrong place at the wrong time—collateral damage.”

Murphy turned to Dave. “We need to have FBI teams in place, hidden right outside the gate. They need to be able to stop Hannah and get everyone out of the car in case it comes to—”

“It’s not going to,” Dave said as firmly as he could muster. Apparently it wasn’t firmly enough, so he added, “But we’ll be ready for everything.” He looked at Lindsey.

“I’m on it,” she said, “but before I make that call, I want to point out that we need to make sure Reed won’t come up with his own counterplan. Kill all or most of the hostages now—dead hostages are always easier to control—and when you approach the gate, somehow lure you inside. Coerce you into signing a written confession, then pop you themselves. Invite the FBI in to clean up the remains of a nasty quadruple murder-suicide.”

“Yeah, let’s
not
have them do that,” Izzy said, his anxiety level visibly ratcheting higher.

“Insist on a second proof of life call,” Dave told Murphy what he’d no doubt already figured out for himself. Still, it was worth saying aloud.

“Tell Reed you’ll call him when you arrive at the compound,” Izzy suggested again. He was on his feet pacing. “And why not ask him—no fuck that—
tell
him to let Eden go. Right now. As a show of good faith. She’s an innocent bystander—like Lindsey said, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She didn’t ask to be there, she’s had no training…Damn it, it’s Angelina all over again.”

Murphy stood up, anguish in his eyes. “You think I don’t know that?”