Cold Jade (11 page)

E
vans was ready
.

He wanted to be patient, but he also knew that he had limited time.

He walked over to the girl who was still sitting on the bed. He grabbed her hair, pulled her face toward him and kissed her as she struggled to pull away from him.

“I’m going to fuck you so many times your pussy will be worn out,” he whispered to her. He licked his lips. She tasted like sugar.

He grabbed her by the throat, pushed her back onto the bed, rolled her over and pulled down her pants.

Evans gasped. Her ass was creamy white, milky like a farm girl.

The girl was flat on her stomach, her arms spread wide over the bed.

Evans unbuckled his pants.

He dropped his pants to the floor, then his underwear. He stroked his dick.

He climbed onto the bed and straddled the girl.

This was going to be-

Evans felt the girl twist underneath him and he was glad. He liked it better when they fought.

But then he realized the girl was on her side and her arm was coming up from the edge of the bed.

There was something in it.

He felt a stabbing pain in his side and looked down to see a piece of wood buried in his side.

Evans suddenly had trouble breathing.

It was like some giant weight was on his chest.

The girl pushed him off the bed and he landed on the floor, looked up as he saw the girl swing a lamp at his head. It connected.

Then darkness.

M
ack picked
up the phone and got Fletcher on the line.

“What is it?” she said.

“Moody found the trail back to Colorado, near the site where the kids’ bodies were discovered.”

“So what are you thinking?” she said.

“I’m thinking that’s where the killing location is,” he said. “I think people put in orders online, and then arrangements are made for the killing to take place somewhere in Colorado. And that’s where they dispose of the bodies.”

“What do you need?”

“We’ve got a team scrambling from Denver. Who knows what they’re going to find out there.”

“Are you still not buying that suicide?” she asked him.

“Absolutely not. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that whoever is behind this is way too smart for something like that. I think they knew we were getting close and they made a sacrifice to throw us off the trail.”

“Or maybe it was one of those rare instances where the psychopath finally does kill himself.”

Mack realized she was just playing devil’s advocate.

“No. This isn’t over,” he said.

R
ebecca was shaking
. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. A guy on the floor surrounded by blood, and now bleeding from the head. His eyes were wide open, too.

Had she killed him?

She didn’t know. But what she did know was that if that woman came back and found the guy dead, well, Rebecca had a pretty good idea of what would happen.

The woman would kill her, no doubt.

This was no political kidnapping with a ransom involved. Rebecca understood that, now.

All along, they had planned to do horrible things to her.

Which meant she had to find a way to get out.

Rebecca tried the door but it was locked, as were all of the windows.

She went back to the dead man on the floor.

His pants were still on the floor, too. She picked them up and dug through the pockets, nothing. Completely empty.

How could that be?

Then she remembered that he had gone into the other room.

Rebecca went to the table where she saw what she instantly understood to be sex toys.

And there, at the edge of the table, was a wallet, some car keys and a phone.

But the phone wasn’t a cell phone, she could tell that. It was a little bigger and heavier.

Her heart was beating a million miles a minute as she picked it up, realized it was off, and powered it on.

It felt like an eternity waiting for the phone to power up. Were there cameras in the cabin? Probably.

She looked around but didn’t see any.

At last the phone lit up and she looked at the display.

It was a touch screen.

But not like one she’d seen before.

Still, she managed to call up the keypad.

She hit 9-1-1 and pressed the phone to her ear.

Surprisingly, she heard a voice on the other end of the line.

“
W
e just got
a 9-1-1 call from a girl claiming to be Rebecca Spencer,” an agent announced in the middle of the war room.

“Is it her?” Mack asked. “Verification?”

“We don’t know,” the agent said.

Mack looked at Moody. “Does the location match?”

The room fell silent.

“Yes,” Moody said.

Immediately the room descended into a frenzy of activity as the exact location was sent to the SWAT team which had already been scrambled from Denver.

“It’s a remote location,” the agent said. “We’re choppering them in. They should be there in about twenty minutes. We’ll have full audio and video here,” he said pointing to the screen in the war room.

“Tell them to hurry,” Mack said. “And be careful. There may be someone waiting for them.”

T
here was
a camera in the cabin.

With a feed that led to a control room in Butterfly’s compound.

The problem was, after Evans had slapped the girl and gone to get a drink, Butterfly had stopped watching.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t watch, far from it. But the murderous rampages had become boring and commonplace to her.

So once she knew that Evans was locked in the cabin with the girl, she didn’t really care what happened. Still, it was part of her job to monitor, and make sure nothing went wrong.

All Butterfly had done was check her encrypted computer for messages from The Owner, then stripped and cleaned her Colt 911.

After that, she went and took a look at the monitor.

It took her a moment to realize what she was seeing. The customer, Bernard Evans, on his back on the cabin floor, surrounded by blood, some sort of long, jagged piece of wood sticking out of his side and a lamp on the floor next to his head.

The girl, standing in the middle of the room with a SAT phone in her hand.

Butterfly felt a brief moment of disbelief, and realized she had made a second mistake. How had Evans gotten a SAT phone past her?

She shook her head, fear beginning to tingle throughout her, and then a vibration ran through her body, followed by a thrumming sound in her ear.

And then she made yet another realization.

Choppers.

I
t wasn’t her capture
. Or the interminable time spent in the back of a vehicle. It wasn’t even killing the man. He deserved that. No, years later, when Rebecca looked back at her ordeal, one thing stood out as the most terrifying moment.

The waiting.

She stood in the middle of the cabin, the SAT phone in her hand, the dead man on the floor behind her.

There was no way out. The door was locked and she guessed it could only be opened from the outside with one of the cards the woman had used.

Rebecca stood in the room. The phone in one hand. The shard of wood in the other. She had pulled it out of the dead man’s body.

The sound of helicopters reached her ears and a faint glimmer of hope blossomed inside her chest.

She watched as blood dripped from the piece of wood onto the cabin’s floor.

And then she heard the sound of footsteps outside.

An image of the woman flashed in front of Rebecca’s eyes.

She gripped the piece of wood so hard it cut into her hand.

If it was the woman, Rebecca would throw herself at her, no matter what. Even if the woman had a gun.

Rebecca didn’t care.

She would rather die than be a captive again.

T
here was
no hesitation on Butterfly’s part.

She had grabbed her bag even as a message came through on her phone. It was the worst news she could have gotten.

Butterfly ran.

Out of her cabin, through the back woods and down a steep draw.

There was a vehicle five miles away accessible only through the steepest terrain and far enough from the cabin to avoid detection yet close enough to a rural highway.

With effortless ease, she slid the backpack onto her shoulders mid-stride and ran beneath the thick canopy of trees toward the waiting vehicle. It was a trail she was familiar with as it was part of her daily training routine. She knew every bump in the trail and now, she ran it faster than ever before.

For years she had been devoid of most emotion. But now, as she ran, a tear escaped the corner of her eye. A murderous rage rose inside her.

Her friend, the only human being in the world she had allowed herself to love, was gone.

The message that had come through on her phone told her that. It was a code they had agreed on should either one be in danger of being killed or captured.

But he had included one more piece of information.

The name of the person responsible for their downfall.

“
T
hey had
to break a door down, but they got her,” the agent said.

Mack was watching through the helmet cam of one of the SWAT team members. All he could see was a clearing with a collection of small cabins and what looked like a main house.

“Must have been some kind of resort. Or hunting lodge,” Mack said. “Let’s find out who owns it, immediately.”

“We’ve got an ID on the dead man,” another agent said, a phone pressed to his ear. “Bernard Evans, CEO of Burn Software.”

“Jesus,” Mack said.

“This is interesting,” Moody said.

Mack walked over to where the computer specialist stood, in front of a large computer screen showing rapidly radiating codes and symbols.

“What is it?” Mack said.

“One of the spiders had gone directly to Evans’ network.”

“That makes sense if he was one of the customers,” Mack said.

“I know but here’s what’s interesting. Someone is killing the spiders and shutting down the system.”

Mack considered that for a moment.

“Could Evans have preprogrammed his network to self-destruct if he was caught?” he asked.

“No, a lot of it can be automated, but what you’re seeing here is someone manipulating these searches in real-time.”

“Can you tell if they’re shutting down Evans’ network, or the entire Store network?”

“Everything is being shut down.”

He thought about it. If the person closing down the system was an ally of Evans, the focus would be Evans’ history.

And then it hit Mack all at once.

He knew what was going on.

“Shit,” he said.

“Someone didn’t set us up. They set him up,” he said, pointing to the screen of the now dead Bernard Evans.

R
eese Stocker sat
on the sand on the coast of Belize, watching the waves roll in. He had a glass of rum in his hand and the thought brought a smile to his face. He hadn’t had a drink of rum in years. Doing it now, he felt like a pirate.

He was glad to be out of Silicon Valley, happy to have exacted his revenge on Bernard Evans.

Most of all, he was glad he had gotten away with it.

With his computer skill, discovering what Evans had been up to was easy. Finding the owner of the Store had taken a lot more time and effort. And then selling some of his stock in Burn in order to fund the killing of Terry Piechura had been even more difficult.

But Bernard Evans had been a genius. And he had told Stocker many, many times that money could buy anything.

Anything.

In this case, it had bought Reese Stocker the sweetest revenge known to man. Because Burn had been
his
idea. Not Evans’s.

Evans had ripped him off, stolen the spotlight, used his technical genius to take over the company.

So Stocker did what he did best. Avoided a face-to-face confrontation and used his massive intelligence to program a solution.

Setting up the crazy hacker who’d come up with Store was the most dangerous part. Stocker knew the man had a partner, people who probably did the guy’s dirty work.

But like all great ideas, there was risk involved.

In this case, the potential rewards won out.

Now, he was on the beach with hundreds of millions of dollars in hidden bank accounts and a foolproof identity.

Maybe he would get a part-time job. Like an anonymous offer to help law enforcement better police the Internet.

“Ha!” he laughed out loud.

There was no one around.

He owned near a half-mile of beach here. It was as private as beachfront property could get.

A shadow crossed the sun and he momentarily missed the warmth. But the sun was there, over the horizon.

He looked up, into the face of a startling beautiful woman.

She smiled at him.

But the gleam that flashed in his eye wasn’t from her smile.

It was from a long knife held in her right hand.

“They call me Butterfly,” she said.

“You don’t–” Stocker began to say.

Butterfly drove the knife directly into Stocker’s heart.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes I do.”

T
HE END