Authors: Matt Hilton
Soldiering should be an honourable pursuit, but there was a truth about why people became soldiers that wasn’t always apparent. Basically there are few reasons why people enlist. Ambition motivates some, duty and family history others, some enlist because they’ve nowhere else to go and then there’s the final group. They become soldiers because they have a need to kill, and if they can make a wage from doing what they enjoy then even better. Sometimes the reasons for enlisting overlapped, and sometimes they changed over time. I was of the group who had nowhere else to go, but I became a killer, though I never enjoyed it.
I wondered what path the Jaegers had followed. I guessed they came from a family with a military history, and brother followed brother into the services, as had their father and grandfather before them. Had they become soldiers through duty and family honour, before their sensibilities had been beaten and warped on the devil’s anvil of war to a point where they had lost their original focus?
Whatever. Psychoanalysing wouldn’t help. The Jaegers were scum now, and my enemies.
26
It was a different room, a different chair, but Billie’s situation hadn’t changed much in the last few hours. She was still a prisoner, in an abandoned office that doubled as a cell. While she’d been escorted from one holding room to the other she’d been allowed to visit the bathroom, but it had been difficult relieving herself while observed by stern-faced men who wouldn’t allow her the privacy of closing the door behind her. They’d stood, barely making the effort to avert their gazes as she’d squatted over the bowl. What did they expect her to do, make an impromptu weapon out of balled toilet tissue? She assumed that their reticence to allow her out of their sight was because of the small window high up in the back wall of the cubicle. Maybe they expected her to try to make a break for it, but one brief glance had been enough to tell her it’d be a smaller woman who fit through that neat space. Hell, the last time she could have squeezed through that window was when she was a slip of a child Nicola’s age. Bringing her daughter to mind had an instant effect on her, but not in an expected way. There was no melancholy or longing for her dead child, but anger. How dare these men treat a grieving mother this way? She’d given her guards a piece of her mind, vociferously shamed them into momentarily looking away while she struggled to get her pants around her knees and squat down.
After that they’d marched her in silence to the second room, where she was handed over to other men who’d strapped her down in a chair, again ensuring she had limited movement by way of zip-ties and Velcro straps. They left the room but stationed themselves outside. Billie could make out their shadows through the opaque ribbed glass in the door. A young, athletic-looking woman in a green uniform with the decal tags removed had come in, carrying a tray. She wasn’t delivering Billie’s supper. On the metal tray was a plastic bottle with a drinking straw, but there was no food. A nylon pouch took up the other side of the tray. The woman placed the tray on the floor, well out of range of Billie’s feet, and picked up the bottle. She came forward, and without a word pressed the drinking straw to Billie’s lips. Billie was tempted to spit the straw out in defiance, but she was as thirsty as hell. She sucked hungrily on tepid water that tasted like the warm plastic container it came in. Before she was finished the woman pulled the straw away. Billie was left feeling thirstier than ever. But she wasn’t going to beg for more. ‘You stinking bitch,’ she said. ‘Keep the water, you’ll need it for next time you remember to douche.’
Billie eyed the woman, who raised a plucked eyebrow, then snorted under her breath at Billie’s insolence. She turned and walked away without comment, leaving the tray and nylon pouch. Billie stared at the pouch as if it was a bomb on countdown to detonation.
The nylon pouch didn’t explode, but she almost did. It took rigid self-control not to holler and rant, because she still had no idea what her captors were waiting for and her guards had refused her the slightest of clues. She was left to ponder and she was sure it had been for hours. This time she didn’t sleep, and the time crawled by.
There was no mystery why she’d been snatched. The ATF agent, Cooper, had warned her that she might be the target for the people diligently chasing her husband. Joe Hunter had enforced the idea too. But what could she tell her captors? The official police report said that Richard crashed his car, plummeting from a bridge into a deep ravine, killing both him and their daughter, Nicola. Billie knew that Richard was dead, even if his body had never been recovered from the river the way Nicola’s had. She’d learned that a man resembling Richard had been spotted coming through Seattle-Tacoma Airport, red-flagged via a facial recognition program. The program must have been flawed, because it simply could not have been Richard. Of course, it wasn’t Richard everyone was most interested in finding. It was the money he’d allegedly squirrelled away from the accounts of several shell companies, one of them involved in the illegal arms trade. Thirty million dollars was a large motivator, enough that the company would pay handsomely to anyone who could reunite it with its original owners. The armed men who’d killed Hunter, and snatched her, were simply stormtroopers, brutish men who did the grunt work, but she trusted there was someone behind them and it was he who wished to question Billie. What the hell did they hope to learn from her? If her husband had stolen money, then they wanted to find it. But it wasn’t as if the cash was an actual tangible commodity, was it? The thirty million dollars they were concerned about was probably nothing more than a sequence of numbers lost in cyberspace. Did they expect Richard to have hoarded it somewhere, a massive mound of stacked dollar bills, and handed Billie his treasure map, ‘X marks the spot’ emblazoned over the location of the loot? It’d be funny if things weren’t so damn serious.
She assumed that she was going to be dangled like a carrot, bait to draw in Richard. But he wouldn’t be coming. So what would happen then: physical torture to force her into giving up the money’s secret location? Little good that would do any of them, considering she had no clue. In fact the first she’d heard of her husband’s alleged criminal activity was from Agent Cooper. His infidelity wasn’t the only secret that Richard had kept from her.
She looked again at the nylon pouch on the tray, and had a good idea what was within it. It wasn’t unlike the pouch from which the thugs had pulled the needle to sedate her last night. However she didn’t expect that this one held the same drug; why would they want to knock her out if they were looking for answers? She didn’t think it was an incapacitant, and had a horrible feeling that there’d be no waking up from it. Placing the damn thing in her cell was tantamount to psychological torture. She knew enough about kidnap to know that seeing her abductors’ faces was never a good thing; it meant they weren’t concerned about witnesses because they planned on doing away with her after she was no longer useful.
Maybe she shouldn’t be so adamant about his death when they asked if Richard was still alive. Hell, let them search the globe for him and she’d be happy to stick around while they were at it. The longer they were engaged in a wild goose chase, the longer she had to find a way out of her predicament.
Outside in the corridor there was a brief mutter of voices and the clip of heels on hard flooring. Through the grainy ribbed glass of the door she watched the shadows shift as one of her guards moved. A key rattled and the door was pushed open. The eldest of the two men responsible for drugging her last night stood in the threshold. He’d discarded his informal clothing and now wore pristine black slacks, a pale grey shirt and maroon tie, expertly knotted. His black leather shoes gleamed, buffed to mirror sheen. His spectacle lenses had been recently cleaned too, and were crystal-clear. He’d shaved and his skin was almost waxy, drawn taut across the lumpy planes of his face. Discounting the broken nose, the surly turn of his mouth, he didn’t resemble a thug now, more a business executive. He studied her without comment before entering and stepping aside, making room for his superior.
Whomever Billie had expected, this wasn’t he.
In fact the person that walked into her cell wasn’t even a ‘he’.
A forty-something woman, willowy and tall, entered and stood on high heels, her ankles touching, her hands clasped at her midriff. She wore a trouser suit, grey, over a pale lilac shirt and a thin gold chain encircled her swan-like neck. Her auburn hair hung in loose curls around her shoulders, but not in a haphazard fashion: hours and much expense had gone into her ‘natural’-looking hairdo. She too resembled a high-powered executive, and the steel-grey glint of her gaze only added to the impression. She wasn’t a pretty woman. She had an aquiline nose, a bulbous forehead and her mouth was too small, puckered like the painted mouth of a porcelain doll. For some reason Billie feared her more than she did the brutish men who guarded her.
27
Rink drove Adam Sanderson’s SUV while I sat in the back, studying the ingress and egress points of the sprawling logistics hub. Our new friends were in Noah Kirk’s sedan, parked discreetly in the parking lot of a gas station from where they could observe the front access gate to Route 507. At the front of the complex a slip road ran a couple of hundred yards parallel to the main route before converging with it, allowing traffic to gain and match speed before entering the highway. It was late, and the Spanaway McKenna highway was still busier than expected, but once we got off it and on to the surface roads around the site the traffic was much lighter. We followed East Gate Road, then took a left on an unmarked service road that followed the perimeter fence north, along the back end of the distribution complex. I recognised the view as the one showed to me earlier on Adam’s iPad. I noted the tall poles and CCTV cameras, watching for areas where the arc of one camera sweep would meet that of the next. There were no apparent blind spots that I could tell, but I knew that it was largely down to whether or not those watching the camera feeds were alert or not. A raised sidewalk adjacent to the fence was a good sign. If there was a pedestrian right of way then it was highly unlikely that the fence was electrified, or that it was equipped with motion sensors. Someone walking their dog, or kids from the nearby housing project, could easily bump the fence, and set off alarms, and I guessed these inconveniences would’ve been taken into consideration. Any other security measures would be within the perimeter fence.
Approximately three hundred yards along, we came across a back entrance. It was probably only opened to allow fire trucks urgent access, but it didn’t appear to have been used recently. Weeds grew along the bottom of the large gates, intertwining in the wire mesh, and the chain and padlock were rusty. CCTV cameras covered the gate, but I recognised a gap in the security net. The cameras angled down to cover the gates, but the next pole was a good hundred yards away and its cameras were pointed in the opposite direction. Whoever had last used the PTZ facility of the cameras had been tardy, forgetting to realign them to their original targets. I shared a nod with Rink, who’d also recognised a way inside. We didn’t stop.
We followed the service trail to where it dead-ended at an undeveloped tract of land. Bushes and tall grass couldn’t fully conceal the mounds of rubble and dirt, or the burned-out husk of a car, that had been dumped on the fallow ground. On the corner of the perimeter fence stood another CCTV pole, this one armed with two cameras to watch both directions where the fence took a right angle. A well-trodden footpath followed the fence back towards the distant highway and I guessed that people from the housing project used it as a short cut to the shops and services adjacent to the 507 rather than go all the way around the logistics hub.
‘That could be our best way in,’ Rink noted.
‘Security will have grown complacent back here,’ I said by way of agreement. If there were someone watching the cameras, they’d regularly see civilians wandering along the path next to the fence, possibly to a point where they barely registered them anymore.
‘We doing this then, brother?’
‘We have to,’ I replied.
‘We don’t have to. You can still call Cooper and get the FBI on the case.’
‘That’d be the sensible thing to do,’ I said, but without conviction. ‘But what if Billie isn’t here? All we know is that the beacon from her vest is. It could have been removed the way mine has. Billie could have been moved since. If the FBI go in now and find nothing, that’ll be it. Procrylon will know they’re rumbled, and Billie will probably be dropped in a deep hole in the ground somewhere. Then both the FBI and ATF’ll shut us out. Let’s do as we agreed, Rink. We take a look, and if we can’t get Billie out ourselves, then we’ll call in Cooper.’
Rink shook his head, chuckling under his breath. ‘You’ve no intention of calling Cooper.’
I sat quietly. He was right. But my reluctance to hand over the rescue attempt to the federal government had been taken out of my hands. Noah and Adam were under express instructions to call Cooper at the first hint of trouble. Cooper knew I was on the case and I trusted that he was waiting for the inevitable crap to hit the fan: even if he didn’t have an armed response team on stand-by I expected he could call in the other members of his small task force. And if that wasn’t the case, there was an entire battalion of soldiers little more than a stone’s throw away that could be mobilised in a hurry.