Sealed with a Lie (10 page)

I open and then close my mouth. “Tomorrow morning?”

“Yes. And we’ve got a lot of setup and surveillance to do before then. So we need to leave. Now.”

“But Evan, the kidnappers only gave us twelve hours!” I’m starting to panic again.

“You’ve been out less than two. It’s after nine p.m. now. They’ll be transporting Gustav at five a.m.”

I do the math. “Evan, that takes us to less than two hours to grab Gustav before they h-h-hurt Charlie. What if something goes wrong? What if we fail?”

Evan looks at me grimly. He walks over and puts his hands on my shoulders. The irises of his eyes have gone an intense, dark blue. “We are absolutely not going to fail. I refuse to let that happen. So let’s go pick up the very large lorry that Matthis has obligingly located for us.”

“Lorry?” I’m bewildered.

“Truck. I’ll explain on the way.”

We leave the
gasthaus
in our disguises and carry backpacks that contain clothing and ski masks. Once we’re back on the street, Matthis and I go hang out in a café while Evan makes his way to a local Swiss dairy franchise that has a small fleet of delivery trucks. There, he “borrows” one and returns to meet us in the alley behind the coffee shop.

The truck is painted to look like a giant black-and-white cow, with the headlights as eyes—complete with eyelashes—and even a tail delineated on the back door. If I weren’t so worried about Charlie, I might laugh.

Matthis and I quickly crawl into the back, which smells strongly of cheese. So strongly that I’m afraid I’ll be sick. And I will probably have nightmares about drowning in a bowl of fondue or suffocating in a giant grilled-cheese sandwich.

As we ditch our disguises and change into plain black clothing, I say to Evan, “
This
is your idea of an urban assault vehicle?”

“What, I should have stolen a city bus? Maybe a limo for your ladyship? This is completely innocuous and unmemorable. Who will question a dairy truck making early morning rounds?”

“I just want to know if we’re delivering milk on the way to grab Gustav.”

“Very funny. I like this truck. I’m calling her Spot,” Evan says.

Spot? Seriously?

The truck is very clean inside, despite the smell. Matthis and I hang on for dear life to a couple of straps bolted to the wall as Evan takes a corner too quickly and accelerates.

“Matthis, how’s it coming with the traffic lights near the airfield?”

“I’m in, thanks to Rita. It’s a little tricky with the timing, but I can pull it off. We’ll stop the police van here—” He turns the screen of his laptop to face me and points. “Then detour it to this back road, which will dead-end into roadblock barriers that we’ll put partially into position now—as soon as we grab them.”

“What about other traffic on the road?” I’m anxious.

Matthis shakes his head. “It’s very unlikely between the hours of ten p.m. and five a.m. The only people who’d take such a rural route are residents of little farmhouses out there, and I’m betting they’ll be in bed.”

“But what if they’re not?” I persist. I’m so afraid something will go wrong and Charlie will be hurt.

“Kari, don’t worry. The barriers will be off to the side until we push them into place around four thirty a.m. So nobody will pay much attention to them. Plus Rita’s hacked into the telephone company’s system, and she’ll see to it that the phone lines are down. She’ll also jam the cell coverage here, just to be safe. That way nobody can call out—not even the guards on the transport truck.”

“Okay,” I say. “But how—and where—are we getting roadblock barriers, exactly?”

Evan chuckles. “That’s our next stop.” He pulls over the dairy truck and puts the transmission in neutral. “Your turn to drive, sweetheart. I’ve got to change clothes.”

I balk. “I’ve never driven a truck of this size—”

“Time to learn,” Evan says cheerfully. “Anyway, it’s easy as long as you don’t have to reverse or parallel park. Neither of which you’ll be doing.”

“Great . . .”

Evan gets out of the driver’s seat, already peeling off his shirt, and we awkwardly slide by each other in order to change places. I completely ignore his six-pack abs, thank you very much. I most certainly do not examine his insanely buff upper arms, which are about the circumference of my thighs.

Evan clearly works out more than your average guy—much more than Luke, though I remind myself
that Luke’s legs are better because of the sprints and hurdles he does in track. Evan lifts weights, probably with hordes of drooling girls slyly checking him out . . . kind of like right now.
Stop it, Kari!

Let’s just say that it’s no surprise that, with arms like his, Evan was able to choke me unconscious in record time.

I slip into the driver’s seat of the dairy truck, buckle the seat belt, and grip the wheel. I do not think about Evan taking his pants off in the back. I step firmly on the gas. There’s a roar as the engine revs, but we don’t move an inch.

“It helps to take it out of neutral, darling.” Evan’s voice betrays his rich amusement at my expense. “And, though I love the appreciative audience, keep your eyes on the road.”

I do hate him, after all.

I slam the gearshift into drive and hit the gas hard again, so that the half-naked jerk is thrown against the wall of the truck.

“Would someone like to tell me where the hell we’re going?” I ask sweetly, trying to get used to the heaviness and clunkiness of maneuvering this giant rectangular cow on wheels. It’s not like driving any car I’ve ever had the privilege to borrow.

“There’s a construction site ahead,” Evan says. “Take the next right and the third right after that. Then drive for about two miles. The place will be on the left. They’re building some kind of municipal hall, and they’ve got some handy barricades up that we’ll just pop into the back of Spot here.”

“Fine,” I say. “What about the detour signs, though?”

“Snagged two of them yesterday in Munich. They’re in the artist’s portfolio.”

“When?”

“When I was rounding up our disguises.” Evan, now fully dressed, comes up front and sits next to me, in the passenger seat.

“I’m feeling a little inadequate in the face of your ingenuity,” I say.

“Don’t. You’re doing an excellent job of terrifying us with your driving so that we can’t be nervous about ambushing three armed guards, so thanks for that.”

Matthis chortles at that one.

Aaarrghh! Have I mentioned lately that I
do
hate Evan Kincaid?

Furious, I take the next right, as instructed.

“What, you’re going to let me live after that statement?” Evan inquires politely.

“No. I’m just trying to decide the best way to kill you,” I assure him.

“You’d best wait until after we get Gustav. You need my help with the guards.”

In the end, it’s both easier and harder than I thought it would be. It’s simple to grab the road barriers and toss them into Spot the Dairy Truck. Before dropping them off, we do surveillance on the detour road for an hour, and Matthis is right—it remains deserted and trouble-free.

The hardest part of the whole operation, for me, is
the waiting. The night is also freezing cold—only to be expected in December in Germany--and it begins to snow with a vengeance. It looks like a picture postcard outside, with twinkling lights everywhere and the trees loaded down with tufts of snow. But this fairy-tale comes with a windchill factor of about minus twenty.

Poor skinny Matthis’s bones are practically clacking together as he shivers uncontrollably. My teeth chatter, and we can all see our breath as we exhale. I wish we’d taken the comforters off the beds in the
gasthaus
and brought them with us.

Though initially I thought the ski masks were a little melodramatic, I’m thankful for them now—except that my nose is still getting frostbite. I’m sure of it. I rub at it, and then at my arms.

Matthis is crouched in his praying mantis stance, his eyes glued to the screen of his laptop. He’s tracking the transport truck via a GPS chip. When I ask Evan how we got a GPS tracker on the truck in the first place, he smiles mysteriously and says that he’s got friends in low places.

“Okay, people,” Matthis says tersely. “Our boy is half a mile away.”

We moved the barriers into position and put up the detour signs roughly thirty minutes ago; it’s now 5:17 a.m.

One hour and forty-seven minutes until those bastards hurt Charlie—or not. Depending on me. On us. Every fiber of my being is knotted; every nerve ending is vibrating with anxiety.

Evan touches my shoulder. “It’s going to be just fine. All right?”

I close my eyes and nod.

Evan straps on a motorcycle helmet, just in case the collision is really bad. He doesn’t want to kill the driver or the other guards, just stun them or knock them out. Of course, there are no guarantees—crashing one vehicle into another isn’t an exact science.

Not to mention that it’s very dangerous.

“Be safe,” I say.

“I’ll try.” He gives me a wry twist of his lips—the ghost of a smile. I just hope the rest of him isn’t a ghost before this little maneuver is complete. . . .

“Here they come!” Matthis announces. “Okay, changing the light at the corner: It’s now red. Kari, time for us to get into position.”

Matthis shoves the laptop into his backpack and shrugs it on. I flex my fingers in their thin leather gloves and make sure I have the zip ties in my back pocket. Then we jump from the back of the van and hide in the trees at the ambush point. Evan starts the engine, revs it, and waits, making sure Spot’s “eyes,” the headlights of the dairy truck, are off. We’ve covered the taillights and the running lights with black electric tape so that nothing gives us away.

“And . . . game time!” Matthis whispers.

Sure enough, a silver-colored van with a wide, dark blue stripe and
POLIZEI
emblazoned on the side turns the corner, slowly, somewhat cautiously. Clearly the driver
wasn’t expecting the detour. He may even be trying to call in to management to let them know what’s happening. Of course, he won’t be able to get through, courtesy of Rita.

Before we can even catch our breath, Evan roars out of the darkness and slams Spot’s passenger side into the driver’s side of the transport van, roughly at the front left wheel.

The noise is explosive; deafening. My heart literally feels as if it’s jumped out of my ribs and is trying to hurl itself past my esophagus. I almost choke on it as I run out of the trees toward the rear sliding door of the police van. As I wrench it open, I practically sob with relief as Evan jumps out of the driver’s side of Spot, unharmed. The passenger’s side door is history, crumpled beyond recognition.

“Go!” he shouts.

I pull a stunned guard out of the transport van, head-butt him to add to his shock, and then give him a good chop in the windpipe. He falls to the ground, clutching his neck. Before he can react further, I grab his gun and train it on him.

“Hands behind your back!” I yell, straddling him at the hips.

I jerk his left arm behind him, jam the muzzle of the gun behind his right ear, and repeat my order. He obeys. I zip-tie his wrists. Then I bind his ankles together with more of the electric tape. It’s handy stuff.

Evidently the driver’s been knocked unconscious. His head smacked the windshield and then the steering
wheel. He’s covered in blood but still breathing, with a fairly regular pulse.

Evan, Matthis, and I move cautiously toward the back of the transport van, where a third guard sits inside with the prisoner.

Evan gestures for the two of us to get low to the ground. Then he tosses a rock at the handles of the doors.

Shots ring out immediately. The guard inside is panicked, and who can blame him?

This isn’t good news. The shots are loud, overpoweringly so, and sound exactly like what they are. Neighbors are probably being woken up. Neighbors who may or may not come running.

“Put down your weapon!” Evan bellows. “Put it down on the floor—and we won’t hurt you.”

Two more shots ring out.

“Shit,” Matthis says. He’s trembling from head to toe, whether from adrenaline or cold, it’s hard to say. Maybe from both.

“Stay low,” snaps Evan.

One last time, he yells at the guard inside. “We won’t hurt you. We just want Gustav.”

The door of the van flies open, and a last bullet goes whizzing past Evan’s head as he curses a blue streak.

Then a dark, rumpled figure erupts from the back of the vehicle and starts running. Awkwardly, with his hands in front of him.

“What the—?” I see a flash of silver in the moonlight—handcuffs—before the figure trips and falls on his face in the snow. The gun he was holding goes flying. “It’s
Gustav!” I shout. “He’s escaping!” I hurtle after him, wondering what’s happened to the guard.

Within six strides, I’ve caught up to Duvernay. I leap onto his shoulders, knocking him facedown once again as he tries to get up. Because of my forward momentum, I somehow end up astride his neck, his head between my thighs. “Freeze!” I yell.

I know that not even cops say that in real life—only in the movies—but somehow it comes out of my mouth.