Betrayed (24 page)

The vehicle skidded to a stop, its wheels inches from Alesandro's head and shoulders.

Shane jumped out the driver's door. Max flew from the passenger side.

Jack came from the back.

“They're inside the building,” Elena shouted.

“Are you all right?” Shane called urgently.

“Yes.”

He turned toward the warehouse as the loading-dock door opened, followed by a blast of gunfire.

Elena screamed. She couldn't see Shane, and she dashed around the borrowed car, using the SUV for cover.

As she peeked around the fender, she saw the Rockfort men crouching below the level of the loading dock, using the concrete barrier as a shield.

Shane had a backpack with him. He set it down and reached inside, pulling out something and tossing it through the open door into the warehouse interior.

It exploded inside with a terrible noise, a burst of smoke, and a concussion that shook the surrounding area.

He tossed in a second, then pulled a gas mask over his face. The other Rockfort men followed suit before dashing up the steps and pulling the door open.

Gunfire rattled through the smoke. The Rockfort men went in shooting, and Elena could see nothing. But she heard the sounds of battle.

***

Shane led the way up the stairs. Instead of pulling the pedestrian door open, he eased around to the garage opening. Beyond was a large room with cinder-block walls and industrial shelving clustered in several locations. At the back were spaces partitioned off into what might be offices. One of their opponents lay on the floor about halfway between the front and back of the open area. Jack moved toward him and rolled him over.

“Dead.”

As he spoke a burst of gunfire came from the back of the building.

While Jack retreated to the staging area, Shane and Max were already leaping toward the nearest shelves. They pulled them away from the wall and toppled them on their sides. Using the barrier as a shield, all three Rockfort men began to advance on the back of the building, pushing the shelves in front of them.

“It sounds like only one guy firing,” Shane said.

“Hopefully, the rest are dead,” Jack answered.

They kept moving toward the lone gunman, who must be holed up in one of the offices.

“Wait,” the gunman shouted.

“For what?”

“I'll cut a deal with you.”

“Now? After you've spent so much time going after S&D?”

“Because Kinkead has something worth billions.”

“What?”

“A program that can predict which stocks are going to make fantastic short-term gains. Nothing like it exists. He's going to market it to investors, and it will make them some money, but he's keeping the best parts for himself.”

“Where did he get it?”

“From the father of a smart-as-shit kid.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Your girlfriend's got a copy of it. And we can share it.”

***

Elena knew she should stay where she was. She knew, but her brother was still lying in the middle of the road.

She ran to him, caught him under the shoulders, and dragged him back so that the bulk of the SUV was between him and the gunfight.

She'd gotten Alesandro to safety, but she gasped as she saw the smear she'd left on the wet pavement. He'd been lying in a pool of blood, and a red trail had followed him to the shelter of the SUV.

“Alesandro,” she gasped.

His eyes flickered open. “Elena…you came for me.”

She frantically pulled at his shirt. She had tended Shane's wounds. She could do the same for Alesandro. “Where are you hit?”

He reached for her hand to stop her. “Don't. It doesn't matter.”

“But…”

“They beat me up pretty bad. Stuff inside me is broken. This is a mercy.”

“No!”

“Listen to me. I don't have much time. I heard them talking…” He stopped and took a breath. “They called him Mr. Weller.”

“Just stay quiet,” she soothed as she leaned over her brother.

“Elena, you're a good girl. I was always going to disappoint our parents.” He stopped and coughed, then started talking again. “Tell them I'll wait for them in heaven.”

“Alesandro.”

He didn't answer, and when she leaned over him and felt for a pulse in his neck, there was none.

Tears welled in her eyes as she reached to close his eyelids. She had thought she could rescue him, but she'd been wrong. He had suffered so much, and now he was dead.

***

“Nice of you to offer, but I don't think so,” Shane growled.

“Wait. Why not?”

There were a lot of things Shane could have said, but he kept it simple. “Because you're a motherfucking scumbag.”

He pushed the metal shelving forward, advancing on the man who began to shoot again, the sound of the automatic weapon echoing in the towering space.

Shane reached the wall of the first office, picked up the shelving, and smashed it through the window as an arc of gunfire followed the unexpected intrusion.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Shane darted around the corner and saw a tubby guy wielding an assault rifle. He shot the man in the chest. Cautiously he advanced on him, but the bastard wasn't playing possum. He was dead, and as Shane stared down at him, irony washed over him. They'd called this guy Mr. Big. And he was bulky enough to live up to the name.

“Check the back of the building,” he called to his friends as he dashed back the way he'd come.

***

Elena looked up, seeing a figure running toward her. In the light spilling from the warehouse, she couldn't see who it was, and she raised her gun.

“Elena, it's me.”

“Shane!” She stood, dashing toward him. He leaped off the edge of the loading dock, landed on the pavement, and sprinted toward her.

They fell into each other's arms, clinging and rocking.

“Mr. Big?” she gasped out.

“He's not going to be after us any longer.”

“
Gracias
a
Dios
.” Then she raised her face. “He's dead?”

“Yeah. He might be alive if he hadn't tried to kill me.”

Shane looked past to see the crumpled figure lying nearby. “That's your brother?”

“
Sí
.”

“I'm sorry,” he whispered.

“Thank you.”

He stroked his hands comfortingly over her back.

“He said they had hurt him badly when they tortured him. He said he wasn't going to make it.” As she said the last part, she struggled to hold back a sob.

“I'm sorry,” Shane said again. “You came all this way to rescue him.”

“Nobody could rescue him,” she answered, finally understanding the truth. “He lost his sense of direction, and there was no way…” She let the sentence trail off.

“I know.” Shane continued to stroke her, holding her close, and she could have stayed there forever.

In the next moment, he broke the spell. “We can't stay here,” he murmured.

“I know.”

As she acknowledged the urgency in his voice, he eased away.

She raised her head, taking in the scene of carnage.

“But the police…” she began.

“We've still got things to do, and we won't get to do them if we're all balled up with the cops.”

The two other Rockfort men had joined them outside the warehouse.

“Where's your gun?” Shane asked.

She pulled the weapon out of the waistband of her slacks and held it downward, the way he'd taught her.

Shane took it, wiped it off, and knelt, pressing it into Alesandro's hand, wrapping his fingers around the butt, and slipping his finger into the trigger guard.

“You're making it look like he and Weller's men had a gun battle?” she asked.

“Weller?”

“He said that's the guy's name.”

“Okay, that's good. The cops will know other people were here. Only the bullet in the guy you shot will match this gun. But they won't trace the rest of them to us.”

“How will they know who Alesandro is?”

“Maybe through his fingerprints. Or maybe they'll need an anonymous call.”

Max was inside the borrowed car, wiping off the steering wheel and the other surfaces.

“He was directing you by phone?” Shane asked.

She nodded and pointed to the hood of the car where she'd left the phone.

Shane retrieved it, wiped it off again, and put it in Alesandro's other hand.

“And the keys?”

She pointed to where they lay on the pavement.

Again, he wiped them off before putting them back into the ignition.

Then they all climbed into the SUV and drove away.

Shane and Elena sat in the backseat, his arm firmly around her.

“You did good,” he said.

“I couldn't have held them off by myself.”

“You held them off long enough for us to get here.”

“I've got the tape from the camera,” Jack said from the front seat.

She winced. “With me naked.”

“Nobody's going to look at it,” he answered.

She leaned into Shane and closed her eyes, but they snapped open moments later.

“Where are we going?”

“The Eastern Shore, to retrieve the SIM card.”

“And return it to Kinkead?”

“After we find out what's on it.”

“Something important to S&D.”

“From what…Weller said, I think it's more than that.”

“What?”

“We have to get the information off it.”

***

Emotional exhaustion finally overcame Elena. She knew that everything wasn't settled, but she was too worn out to care. She drifted off to sleep. Her eyes didn't open until she felt the car slow at the gate of the safe house.

She winced, remembering the last time they'd been there.

Shane stroked her shoulder. “Weller sent the men who came here before. He's not giving any more orders.”

She answered with a tight nod.

“You stay here,” he said to the other two Rockfort men as they pulled up in front of the door. He slipped his arm away from Elena and climbed out of the car, heading for the front porch. The front door was unlocked, and as he pushed it open, he stopped short.

“What?” Max called.

“The place is a mess.”

“Mr. Big, I mean Weller, must have been looking for the S&D stuff.”

Shane's jaw firmed. “If I had to guess, I'd say Kinkead was here, too.”

Jack and Max nodded.

“But we know Weller didn't find it,” Shane said as he disappeared inside. “Otherwise there would have been no point in having you meet him. And I'll know in a few minutes if Kinkead managed to get it.”

Elena waited with heart pounding. It felt as if Shane had been gone for years, but it was probably only a few minutes before he reappeared with the SIM card in his hand.

“Where was it?” Max asked.

“I slipped it into a crack between one of the legs and the top of the workbench.”

His partner grinned. “Clever.”

“Let's find out what's on it,” he said.

Jack looked toward the former safe house. “But not here. We don't know who is going to show up next.”

“Right,” Shane agreed.

They all got back in the car. As they drove back toward D.C., Elena loaded the card into a slot in the computer that Jack had brought along. But when she directed the machine to the card, all they got was gibberish.

Beside Elena, Shane made an angry sound. “We went through a hell of a lot of grief to make sure this card was safe, and now…”

She put a hand on his arm. “It's encrypted.”

His voice was hard. “Which means we can't get into it unless we have the key?”

She nodded.

“That's just great.”

“I think I may know how to get it.”

He gave her a questioning look.

“Remember I told you that Arnold sent me SIMon Sez puzzles. That was how I thought of the SIM card in the phone.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what if he also sent me the encryption key in one of his emails?”

“How do we get the emails?” Max asked from the front seat.

“They're in my mail system. I can access them from here.”

“My guess is that Kinkead locked you out of your office mail.”

“Probably true. But I wanted to think about the puzzles, so I sent them to my home address.”

“Lucky for us,” Shane muttered.

As they drove through the darkness, Elena kept her eyes on the computer screen, downloading messages and collecting them into a folder.

When the car slowed, she looked up and saw that they were back at the Four Seasons Hotel in D.C.

“Might as well enjoy the luxury for a little while longer,” Max said.

The men unloaded their equipment, and they all returned to the suite they'd left six hours earlier. Or was it a lifetime ago?

Morgan was waiting for them. When they came in the door, she jumped up and embraced Jack. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes.”

She turned to Elena, taking in her appearance and the clothing she was wearing. “You made it.”

“Yes.”

“I knew you would.”

Elena gulped. “I wasn't so sure.”

Shane gave Elena a considering look. “Why don't you take a shower and change?”

She glanced down and grimaced as she realized she was still wearing the outfit Weller had supplied.

“While you're gone, I'll copy the messages from Blake onto the other laptops so we can get started.”

“Good idea.”

The shower helped revive her, and she was glad to put on slacks and a shirt she'd brought from the southern safe house. When she came back to the sitting room, she saw the men had ordered breakfast.

“Better?” Shane asked.

“A lot.” She looked around. “Where is everybody else?”

“While you were in the shower, we decided to split up. We did some research and figured out that Weller was a mob boss named Jerome Weller. We got the address of his estate. Jack and Max have gone over there, and Morgan had a meeting with a client.”

Her hands clamped on the mug of coffee with cream and sugar that he'd handed her.

“What will Jack and Max find?”

“Something helpful, I hope. Come eat.”

She saw a cart at the side of the room and found bacon and eggs and various pastries. As she sat down with a plate of food, she decided that her appetite had finally come back.

She ate with the computer on the coffee table in front of her, looking at the puzzles Arnold had sent her. Many of them were grids with letters in them, where you had to spell words going up, down, or diagonally across the grid. All of them had a theme, like names of movies or books, authors, sports terms, or even zoo animals.

Shane was looking at the same material.

“Something interesting,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Even when the theme is movies or something unrelated, other words show up.”

“Like what?”

“Well, he's put his name into the puzzles, for example. And one particular word keeps appearing. Corruption.”

Elena went through the puzzles. Now that Shane mentioned it, she saw the word in various forms. Usually backwards or backwards and diagonally.

Going back to the SIM card, she typed in “corruption.”

She thought at first that she'd blown up the whole program when pictures of fireworks erupted on the screen, accompanied by loud blasts.

Then the graphics disappeared, and the screen said, “Congratulations, Elena.”

Her heart stopped, then started up again in double time as she gave Shane a quick glance. “It's for me.”

When she saw that his expression had hardened, her mouth went dry. With this message, she was back where she'd started with Shane—in the middle of a conspiracy. “I know what this must look like.”

“I know what it
looks
like.
And I know what it's not.” He slung his arm around her and pulled her close. “Elena, I trust you. I know you weren't working with Blake.”

Her mouth was so dry she could barely speak, but she managed to ask, “How do you know?”

“Because I know what kind of person you are.”

Leaning over, he gave her a quick kiss. “Let's see the rest of the message.”

Praying that Blake hadn't said something that would implicate her in his theft, she scrolled down and saw:

“When I was streamlining the S&D files, I accidentally got into a proprietary S&D program called Falcon's Flight. The purpose is to analyze trends in the stock market and identify which stocks were going to have short-term gains of 15 to 20 percent. I didn't know why Lincoln Kinkead was keeping it secret, so I started investigating further. I did some research and found out that the program was developed by Kinkead's nephew, Josh Rosenbloom, his sister's son.”

Elena glanced at Shane, then moved the cursor down so they could both read more.

“I've investigated this from a lot of angles. Kinkead took Josh's original work and had a programmer in Romania improve it. It appears that Kinkead plans to market part of the improved program and share the profits with the Rosenblooms, but it also appears that he is planning to keep the most effective part of the program secret and use it for his own gains, thus depriving Josh's family of enormous income.

“While I was trying to decide what to do about this, I was approached by a man who wanted me to steal a copy of the improved program. He's offered me a lot of money to do this, and I am playing along with him while I decide how to handle the problem. I don't know the man's real name, and I don't know how he found out about the program. And I am reluctant to go to the police because I want to persuade Kinkead to do the right thing by the Rosenbloom family.

“In case something happens to me, Elena, I'm counting on you to see this through. I've included a copy of the entire program on this SIM card.”

Elena could barely breathe when she finished reading.

“Arnold wasn't stealing it,” she managed to say. “He was trying to make sure that Josh Rosenbloom and his family got their fair share of the profits.”

Shane socked his fist against his hand. “And I fell for what Kinkead told me.”

“It was true as far as it went. Weller somehow found out about the program and was trying to steal it,” Elena answered.

“At the same time Kinkead was planning to screw his own nephew,” Shane said. “Blake wanted to stop him, but he put you in terrible danger.”

“It wasn't just him. My brother helped.”

He reached for her, pulling her close.

She laid her head against his shoulder as she whispered, “We need to finish what Blake started. But how do we do it?”

Shane squeezed her hand. “I think we can figure it out together.”

***

Max pulled up at the entrance to Jerome Weller's estate and pressed the button on the intercom.

After several seconds, a man's voice asked, “Who is it?”

“FBI, here to inform you that Jerome Weller is dead,” Max answered. “Killed in a gun battle at a warehouse in Columbia.”

They heard the guy on the other end of the line catch his breath.

“We're only interested in gathering relevant information,” Max said. “We're not going to arrest anybody on the estate if you cooperate. In fact, we'll give you twenty minutes to clear out.”

“How do we know that's not a trick, and we won't be arrested if we try to leave?” the voice asked.

“You'll have to take our word for it. But our best advice is to get yourselves out of this mess.”

“Okay,” the voice answered.

Max backed up and pulled across the road.

Five minutes later, the gate opened and a black SUV barreled out.

They waited another ten minutes before proceeding through the open gate.

“Are they really that stupid?” Jack asked.

“Let's hope so. And hope that the house isn't going to blow up when we start looking for evidence.”

Jack laughed. “Right. And the first thing we'd better do is make sure nobody can pinpoint when we were here.”

***

Shane and Elena talked about how to handle Kinkead. Then Shane got out one of the burner phones and called the head of S&D, using the speaker capacity of the phone so Elena could listen.

“Who is this?” the S&D owner snapped.

“Shane Gallagher.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

“We've been busy.”

“Where are you?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“You said you knew where that SIM card was.”

“We have it.”

“Thank God.”

“I'm going to send you the first part of the information on it,” Shane answered. “Then we'll talk.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“You have the rest of it. I'm sending Arnold Blake's conclusion.” He looked at Elena. She pressed Send on the email she'd already prepared.

In a few minutes, there was an explosion of cursing from the other end of the line.

“What is this crap?” Lincoln Kinkead demanded.

“It's Arnold Blake's last will and testament. Your little shell game with Falcon's Flight got him killed.”

“No,” Kinkead breathed.

“Should we go to the police with this information?” Shane asked.

“No!”

“Then this is what we're going to do. I'm sending you a contract which you will sign. In it, you will give seventy-five percent of the profits from Falcon's Flight to the Rosenbloom family.”

“Seventy-five percent. That's outrageous.”

“Jesus, Kinkead, the kid developed it, not you. I'm letting you keep twenty-five percent, since you've got the marketing ability they don't.”

“What else?” Kinkead demanded.

“I did the job you hired me for. I'm leaving your employ, but I want full pay for the next year.”

“Fuck, no!”

“You're getting off easy on that one. Again, I'm assuming you don't want any of this made public.”

“That's right,” Kinkead growled.

“I'll take monthly payments instead of demanding you pay me in a lump sum.”

Again, Kinkead didn't like it, but he agreed.

Shane glanced at Elena, and she nodded.

“And Elena Reyes is leaving the company,” he said.

“Good.”

“She'll get a year's pay and an excellent reference letter.”

“Now, wait a minute.”

“Again, I think we're in a position to dictate terms.”

“All right,” Kinkead snapped. “Do you have any more demands?”

“If the cops have any questions about what I've been doing for the past few days, you need to say I was on an assignment for you. And if you have any second thoughts, we still have a copy of Blake's account of your double-dealings. If anything happens to us, that will go to the authorities. Understood?”

“Yes,” Kinkead bit out.

“That's all for now,” Shane said as he clicked off.

Elena breathed a sigh, then looked at Shane.

“I have to tell my parents about Alesandro.”

“Yeah. I'm sorry. I know that's going to be tough.”

“I don't know exactly what to say to them.”

“That he had gotten himself in with a bad crowd, there was a fight, and they killed him.”

“And how do I know about any of that?”

“Let me check in with Max and Jack.”

He called the other two Rockfort agents.

“You got anything?” he asked when Max answered the phone.

“Yeah. A lot of good stuff. We're on our way back. Sit tight.”

Elena looked at Shane, “What does that mean?”

“That he doesn't want to talk about it on the phone.”