Dimly lit and massive in its proportions, the inside of the Galleria was silent, save for the staccato slapping of their flip-flops as they hurried across the sky bridge toward the second-level entrance to the parking garage.
“Now we really need to hurry,” Brad said. “We're probably on a lot of security cameras right now.” Noticing the deep furrows of concern in Nicki's forehead, he smiled. “Like you said. Different.”
Nicki didn't know how to respond.
“Relax,” Brad said. “We'll do fine. I've come too far too fast to be stopped by some rent-a-cop.”
At the doors, Brad pulled them to a stop, then scanned the edges of the doors themselves. “You see any alarm contacts?”
“I don't even know what an alarm contact looks like.”
Brad crossed his fingers. “Here goes.” He pushed the door open, and then they were outside, where the humid night air embraced them in a wet hug.
“Wait here,” Brad said, grabbing Nicki by her shoulders and planting her on the curb. “I'll be right back.”
“I can keep up,” Nicki said, with barely enough air to manufacture a sound.
“I know you can, but there's no sense wearing you out. I've got to get some wheels.”
Nicki scowled. “But our car is at the hotel.” His look told her everything. “Oh,” she said.
With the skills he'd honed over the years, he could grab any car that he wanted. It'd be slim pickings, though. At this hour, there were precious few to be borrowed from a mall parking lot. Still, Brad took off as if he knew what he was doing, running full tilt across the largely empty upper deck and disappearing down a ramp.
The night seemed awfully quiet. Sitting there on the curb, all alone, she felt vulnerable, and the ceaseless hammering of her heart didn't help. In her mind, she could see countless thousands of blood cells log-jamming in the hardened vessels of her lungs, waiting their turn to supply her ever-increasing demand for oxygen. Already, she could feel the swelling in her ankles. In a few more minutes, she'd be able to see it, too.
It was still too soon to take any more meds, but it wouldn't be long; just an hour or so. Meanwhile, she could just wait out the episode.
The irony of it all made her so angry: After seventeen years on the planet, without any semblance of a life to speak of, why did
real
living begin at the very time when her body was least able to handle it? She'd had enough trauma in her life for God's sake. Why couldn't someone else take a turn?
Nicki leaned back against a light post and scanned the concrete horizon, resisting the urge to close her eyes. With so little time left, she found herself begrudging every second that her eyes were closed. There was just too much to see.
But until today, the vistas had never changed. Classrooms. Hospital rooms. Bedrooms. The same neighborhood with the same houses and the same cars and the same people she'd seen every day of her life. It was all so boring.
So terribly normal. That's not how Nicolette Janssen wanted to be remembered. She wanted people to think of her as anything
but
normal. As
better
than normal, whatever that meant. She knew it was stupid to think such thoughts, but when she died, she wanted it to be an event on the news.
Her shrink had told her that it was destructive to concentrate on the finality of her disease. “Quality of life,” he'd said, “is more about what one feels in one's mind than what attacks one's heart.” He'd looked proud when he'd said it.
“Let's trade places,” Nicki had suggested. “I'll sit there saying important junk for two hundred bucks an hour, and you climb over here and handle a ticking bomb of your own.”
Nicki understood the doctor's point. Intellectually, she understood
everything
the doctor told her. Who the hell wouldn't understand it? But
knowing
how you're supposed to think about something is a whole world away from ignoring the fact that you're sliding toward a big rectangular hole in the ground.
Now, though, for the first time, she thought she might have a handle on how to make intentions meet reality. The trick was to walk away from everyone who attempted to tell you what to do with your life, and to take a chance for once.
Look at where she was now: She thought she was heading off to hang out with a sweet guy, and now they were running from the cops. It was scaryâscary as hellâbut it was
real.
It was
different,
a
surprise.
Besides, Nicki hadn't done anything wrong. If the cops caught them, she'd go back to same ol' same ol', and that would stink, but man, the trip to get there would be epic.
She smiled as she thought about the look on Brad's face when he told her about the killing stuff and the jail stuff. He thought she was going to freak out, but when she just took it all in, he was surprised. She liked that look on him. That superconfident Mr. God mask had to be peeled away from time to time.
And she'd been the one to do it.
She could hear her father already, ranting on about the danger she'd caused herself by hanging out with a felon. She could see his red face and the distended veins at his collar. He wouldn't care that Brad had never hurt anyone, just as he'd never cared about what Nicki wanted for herself. In Daddy's mind, her worst offense of all would be her defiance of him.
But without the defiance, there'd be no living. That's what he couldn't see. It's why she could never go back, either.
Somewhere down below, the silence of the night rumbled with the sound of an engine turning over.
* * *
The stairwell door to the lobby was also locked.
“God
dammit
!”
So what the hell were people supposed to do in the event of a fire? Just pile up in the stairwells like ice floes in April?
Carter pounded with his fist on the locked door. “Let me in!”
No one answered. And then he understood. This was an emergency exit. If the building was burning, they'd want people to go all the way outside, not to cluster in the lobby. If it were any more obvious, it would have smacked him in the face: down another half-flight, the sign on another door read
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY/ALARM WILL SOUND
.
He should have taken the elevator.
Carter charged at the door, hitting the panic bar with his hip and slamming the door open against the brick façade of the hotel. As promised, an alarm squealed, and he couldn't have cared less. Even the exit chutes were decorative, sporting colorful plants and bushes. He could see the portico circle at the top of the hill on the right. He took off at a run.
If his sense of direction did not betray him, the skyway to the mall was past the main entrance, on the other side of the hotel. It occurred to Carter as he ran up the hill that he couldn't remember the last time he'd taken a quick step. Not exactly out of shape, he wasn't exactly
in
shape, either, and as sweat soaked his clothes, he could feel every one of his forty-five years.
Two uniformed police officers stood sentry at the front doors of the hotel, clearly stationed to watch anyone who might try to leave. The sight of a middle-aged man running straight at them put them on edge. In unison, their hands moved from behind their backs to rest on their Sam Browne belts.
“Come with me!” Carter yelled. “I know where they are!”
The cops exchanged glances that betrayed their assessment of Carter's mental stability. When Carter closed to within a few yards, the cop on the right shifted his hand from his belt to his weapon, holding the other hand out in a gesture that stopped Carter in his tracks. “Okay, mister,” said the cop on the right. “Don't be stupid.”
Carter knew what they must be thinking. “My name's Carter Janssen,” he said breathlessly. “My daughter is with the man you're looking forâBrad Ward. They're not in the hotel anymore. They've fled to the mall over there. If we move fast, I think we can catch them.”
The cop scowled. “I haven't heard anything about that.”
“Of course you haven't. They don't know in there. But I'm telling you now.”
The cop shook his head. “Sorry, sir, but I've got orders. If the lieutenant thoughtâ”
Carter didn't wait for the rest. This was a waste of time. The officers did in fact have their orders, and they were not going to violate them on the whim of a complete stranger. His guys back in Pitcairn County, New York, would have done the same thing.
Without another word, he spun away from the cops and headed for the Galleria parking garage. The two minutes it took for him to run the distance made his legs feel as if they'd hammered out a marathon.
He surveyed the layout of the garage with a single glance. It had been built into the side of a hill, with the mall itself blocking a second side. Nicki and Brad would face two options for escape: they could exit from the bottom level of the four-story parking structure, thus bringing them straight at him, or they could exit from the top level, which, thanks to the rolling hills of the surrounding countryside, was actually at ground level, with easiest access to the freeway.
Upstairs was it. The humidity pressed in on him as he paused to look up the seemingly endless flights, and then got down to business, taking them two at a time.
He was nearly to the third level when he skidded to a stop so abruptly that his momentum pitched him forward on the steps.
Off to his left, from somewhere in the middle of the dimly lit expanse of concrete, a starter switch ground, and an engine caught. From where he stood at the landing between parking levels, he couldn't tell if it came from the second floor or the third.
Then, from the floor aboveâthe thirdâheadlight beams swept the walls of the stairwell.
Carter dashed up the half-flight to the next level in time to see taillights disappearing up the ramp to the fourth floor.
* * *
This time, it was a Honda Accord.
Nicki stood as she saw the headlights painting the far wall, shocked at how much the effort took out of her.
The engine roared as Brad piloted the car around the curve, through a stop sign without slowing, finally skidding to a stop with the front passenger door positioned three feet in front of her. The window lowered itself, revealing a beaming Brad on the far side of the center console, leaning low over the steering wheel to make eye contact.
“Hey, good-lookin', want a ride?” he asked.
Nicki smiled in spite of it all. The guy never knew a serious moment. She lifted the handle and pulled the door open.
“Nicolette!”
Her head jerked up, not believing what she'd heard. Sure enough, there stood her father, fifty yards away, illuminated by the wash of a streetlight. He waved his arms over his head as if to divert an approaching aircraft. His chest heaved from the effort of his run.
“Nicolette Janssen, don't get in that car!”
She frozeâhaving no idea what to do. Looking back through the window, she saw Brad's gaze shift from the front, where he could see and hear her father, and then back to her.
“Nicolette, please!” Carter yelled.
Nicki pleaded silently for Brad to tell her what to do.
“You've got to call this one yourself, hon,” he said. “But do me a favor and do it fast.”
“Do you want me to come along?” she asked him.
Up ahead, her father started walking quickly toward them. “Nicolette Janssen, I forbid you to get into that car!”
“Stay there!” she yelled back at him. She hated the airy sound of her voice, but there was enough emotion there to freeze her dad. She returned her gaze to Brad.
He looked back at her, his face showing nothing. “Nicki, you know what I want you to do, but that's not a reason to come, any more than what he wants you to do is a reason to stay.
You
decide.”
“Nicolette, please don't go,” Carter said. There was a new tone to his voice. A pleading tone. He sounded as if he might be ready to cry. “He's a killer, sweetheart. I don't know what he's told you, but I guarantee you that much is true. Please don't get into that car with him. Don't leave me.”
Why did her father have to do this? Why couldn't he have just stayed away? Why did it have to be about staying with
him
or leaving
him
?
The clock had ticked down to nothing, and the whole world seemed to pause, waiting for her to make up her mind. In the end, the decision wasn't all that complicated. She could choose something new and alive, or something old and dying.
“My name is Nicki,” she said.
She slipped into the seat, barely getting the door closed before Brad peeled rubber clearing the parking lot.
Â
Â
To be continued . . .
Chapter Two
T
he Sleeping Genie Motel seemed to get its own joke. Nestled behind a strip mall in an unincorporated stretch of Route 1 between Woodbridge and Quantico, Virginia, the seedy low-rise 1960s-vintage motor court had a reputation. Let's just say that precious few of the genies in residence did much sleeping, and that the rooms turned over two or three times on a good night.
Jonathan Grave had seen places like this in every military town. The twenty-dollars per night marquee was a dead giveaway. He'd fail a lie detector if he swore he'd never frequented such a place, but it had been a long, long timeâback when most of the promiscuity-related diseases could be cured with penicillin.
“Hey, look, Dig,” Boxers said, pointing through the windshield as they cruised into the crumbling parking lot. “The genie wants you. She's winking at you.”
Indeed, the circle of neon that made up the gaudy sign's left eye had started to wear out, and it looked for all the world like she was winking. The genie was a busty young thing. “I'm saving myself for that special genie,” Jonathan said.
“Looking like that, no genie will have you,” Boxers said. In deference to the daylight hours, Jonathan had done what he could to change his appearance. His nose was slightly larger than normal, and he sported teeth that gave him an overbite. A specially-designed T-shirt gave him a paunch that wasn't real, and he wore a pair of taped-up glasses over his normally blue eyes that were now brown. In general, people overestimated the capabilities of face-recognition software, and nine times out of ten, if police interviewed the people with whom he and Boxers interacted, all they'd remember was the tape on the glasses and sheer size of Boxers, who'd similarly altered his features. In general, Jonathan hated disguises, but sometimes, they were the smart move.
Jonathan waved his hand to the rightâat the edge of the lot closest to the highway. “Pull over here while we work things out.” He lifted his portable radio from where he'd placed it on the center console and pressed the transmit button. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said.
He knew that Venice Alexander would be monitoring everything from the office in Fisherman's Cove, Virginia, about fifty miles to the south and east of here. She pronounced her name Ven-EE-chay, and she was the person every NSA recruiter would sell his left arm to add to his staff.
“Go ahead.”
“Do we have any stronger confirmation on the room number?” Islamist nutjobs had snatched nine-year-old Mindy Johnson, a congressman's daughter, from the parking lot of a shopping mall north of here in Montgomery County, Maryland, and had declared that any attempts to contact the police would result in her execution. The bad guys wanted $1.3 million in cash to get her back. Her fatherâCongressman William H. Johnson of Massachusettsâhad opted to invest in Jonathan's services instead. Mindy had been visiting her father for the weekend, and had been on her way home from hanging at a theater in Rockville, where she'd seen a movie with friends.
Apparently Congressman Dad knew neither that she had gone to a movie nor that she hadn't come home. The first he knew of it was when the kidnapper contacted him at work.
Reaching out to Jonathan was a difficult thing to do, what with all the blind e-mails and cutouts that made him nearly impossible to find. The fact that the congressman had been able to do so within the first eight hours of his daughter's kidnapping told Jonathan that the guy had leveraged some inside information. This was not the first time Jonathan had done work for very important people in Washington.
That initial contact with Jonathan had been nearly eighteen hours ago, and in the interim, Jonathan and his team had been working all angles to find the kid. As often was the case, the big break had lain buried in the electronic metadata that piloted e-mails through cyberspace. With that head start, followed by a lot of phone calls and shoe leather, they'd narrowed the options down to this motel. They had everything but the room number.
“Nothing much has changed since we last spoke,” Venice said. “I'm ninety percent sure that this is the right place. And if that's the case, then I am eighty percent sure that they're in room one twenty-four.”
Jonathan looked to Boxers for an opinion. At six-foot-huge, Boxers, who was born Brian Van de Muelebroeke, was hands-down the largest, most intelligent and most lethal person Jonathan had ever known. “What say you, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked.
Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “Eighty percent stacked against ninety percent. I can't do that math in my head, but it sounds an awful lot like a guess.”
Jonathan agreed. Given the stakes, if only from the firepower they were about to bring to bear, they needed better than that.
“Okay, I copy,” Jonathan said into the microphone.
“Does that mean you're about to go hot?” Venice asked.
“I'll let you know when I do,” he replied. He looked across the console. “We need more, don't we?”
“You're the boss,” Boxers said. “But if I were the boss, I'd want more.” Big Guy had a special way with nondeferential deference.
Hostage rescue was a delicate balance of finesse and violence. Methodical research and stunning speed. It left no room for mistakes. Cops could get away with raiding the wrong house and killing the wrong people because they had friendly prosecutors in their corner. Jonathan had friends, but not in those spaces. Besides, he didn't know if he could live with himself if he killed an innocent.
“We need eyes on,” Jonathan said.
Boxers eyed him. “We need world peace, too. And let's throw in eternal sunshine. The devil is in the details of getting it.”
Jonathan had an idea. “Find me a liquor store.”
Boxers laughed again. “Are we going to throw a party?”
“Sort of,” Jonathan said. Sometimes it was more fun to be cryptic than to be forthcoming. “This is a military town. How far can the nearest booze vendor be?”
“You forget that you're still in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” The state ran all of the liquor storesâand had just raised the tax to be paid on top of the sales over which they had a monopoly. Without the worry of competition, the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board could put liquor stores however far apart they wanted, and charged whatever they pleased.
Boxer cruised their recently purchased old and smelly SUV back out of the parking lot, and back down Route 1 in search of the familiar red-white-and-blue sign of an ABC store. This POS vehicle would be dumped when the mission was done, and they would drive back to Fisherman's Cove in the BatmobileâBoxers' name for the heavily customized and armored Hummer that was their real transportation. It never made sense to let security cameras see your getaway car.
The liquor store resided in a strip mall that looked just like every other strip mall on that stretch of highway. “You're really not going to tell me what you're up to, are you?” Boxers asked as he nosed into the space.
“I'm going to make myself stink,” Jonathan said, and he let himself out. Inside the store, he chose a pint of cheap bourbon, and paid in cash. Back in the vehicle with Boxers, he said, “Okay, let's go back and see the genie.”
“Not until you tell me what you're doing.”
Jonathan winked at him. He stripped the cap off of the bottle, pulled his shirt away from his body, and poured about half the contents down the front of his chest.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I need to smell like a drunk,” Jonathan said.
Big Guy winced and raised a hand to his nose. “Well, that'll do it. Jesus. Why?”
Jonathan explained while they drove back to the Sleeping Genie.
* * *
Ethan went through the motions as if in a dream. A nightmare. His bruises had all congealed into a single body ache. Once they had shoved him into the back of the police cruiser there in the parking lot, right in front of Raven and so many of his coworkers who had all filed out to see what the commotion was about, they shut the door and left him there for what felt like an hour. He wondered if maybe that was all about setting the humiliation hook as deeply as possible.
He tried to ignore reporters' camera lenses as they were pressed against the window. But he couldn't miss the look that Raven had in her eyes when they locked glances. Her gaze had cut him like diamond on glass. It was a look of utter disappointment, of betrayal. She broke the look off after just an instant, but for Ethan the damage was done.
So many faces stared at him. The clerks and customers from so many different stores pointed and said things, but he couldn't hear and he told himself that he didn't care. They didn't know him and he didn't know them, so what did they matter? They were no different than the kids that gathered around his schoolyard fights back in the day, just hungry to see the blood of the guy who lost and to cheer the winner. A few regular citizens tried to come in closer for a better look at him, but the police kept them all at bay.
Among the crowd of cops that mingled between Ethan and the onlookers, Ethan could see the monster's feet sticking out between parked cars. No attempt was made to resuscitate him or to take him off to the hospital. Ethan figured that that meant the Earth was finally free of one more child molester. He hoped that that meant his night terrors might go away.
Detective Hastings opened the door of the police cruiser and leaned in. A smear of blood marked her arm. “Your name is Ethan Falk, is that right?”
He nodded.
“Where do you live?”
He told her, and as he watched her read along from his confiscated driver's license, he figured that she was verifying what it said.
“Do you live there alone?”
“No, ma'am. There's a whole other family there. I just rent a room. That's all I can afford.”
“Are there weapons in the house?”
“I have no idea. None in my room. Am I really under arrest?”
The question seemed to confuse the detective. “You killed a man,” she said. “That's a surefire way to get arrested.”
“But it was self-defense. I already told you that.”
“I'm not saying it wasn't. But that's not for me to decide. That's for the judge and jury.”
“So, I'm going to
jail
?” The realization that should have been so obvious barreled at him.
Hastings smiled, might have even chuckled a little. “I can't exactly let you just walk away, can I? You already told me that you killed that man. Do you expect me to just look the other way?”
Ethan's heart slammed itself against his chest. “You're arresting me for
murder
?”
Hastings cocked her head. Her eyes showed kindness that he hadn't been expecting. “You know, Ethan, I'm just a cop. I'm not a lawyer and I'm not a priest. That means I'm not in the business of giving advice that people listen to. Having said that, I do have a word of advice in case you're interested.”
Ethan felt his shields come up. This was her opportunity to tell him to go to hell. He waited for it.
“If I were you,” she said, “I wouldn't say anything to anyone on any subject until I was sitting across the table from my attorney.”
“But I don't have an attorney.”
“You will,” Hastings said.
* * *
Oh-three-hundred missionsâhostage rescuesâpresented infinite variations on thousands of variables, all of which posed their own unique dangers. Each of these were directly linked to the fact that people were unpredictable even in the best of times. Once they felt threatened, their unpredictability often rose to the level of frenzy, and frenzied people often did stupid things such as shooting at hostage rescuers in spite of superior firepower and skills.
As a hedge, Jonathan and his team stacked the odds in their favor through the use of advanced weaponry, body armor, high-tech surveillance techniques, and flawless marksmanship. One of their most effective force multipliers was their ability to function in the night as effectively as if it were midday, thanks to night vision technologies. The darkness more often than not disoriented their opposing forcesâOpForâmaking even talented fighters less effective.
In an operation such as the one that was unfolding at the Sleeping Genie, darkness posed an even greater advantageâthat of being invisible to the surrounding general public. While Jonathan's team was working at the request of a member of Congress, they had no legal authority to perform any of the operations they undertook. By statute, it was illegal to discharge a firearm in this part of Prince William County, and if those shots killed or injured someone, then Jonathan would have committed a homicide, and it would be left to a jury to decide whether or not the crime was justified. But first the police would have to catch him.
His team always wore gloves on an operation, but as a practical matter it was virtually impossible to eliminate all traces of fingerprints, and with DNA technology being what it was, he couldn't rule out leaving behind a drop of blood or sweat. The good news was that a trace of such typical forensic indicators would lead nowhere. Neither Jonathan nor Boxers existed anywhere in the real world, thanks to efforts by high-placed friends in the government for whom he occasionally did work that for a number of reasons could not afford to be traced back to the officials who'd ordered it.
Long-term survival in Jonathan's world was all about managing the tiny details.
Today, those details were all working against him. While a nine-year-old girl is in the grasp of kidnappers, every second of captivity was an opportunity for serious harm, but the smart call remained to await darkness and the advantages it brought. First, they needed to verify that they had the right place. Once that was done, they could set up surveillanceâeven deploy a small camera to watch what was going onâand from that develop a scoop-and-swoop plan that would mean the smallest amount of harm to the fewest number of people.