Split Second (4 page)

He shook his
head in disbelief and shot her a look that could have melted lead. He obviously
wasn’t used to being ordered around in this way by someone who should be
helpless against him. It was a ridiculous situation, but she didn’t have time
to contemplate the utterly surreal nature of holding off a ruthless assassin,
and turning him into her slave, armed only with a glass of wine.

“Closet!” she
repeated, and after glaring at her for another moment he finally did as she
asked.

Jenna gathered
up the gun, phone, and keys and shoved them into her pockets.

“There’s a door
to the garage through the kitchen,” she shouted so he could hear her inside the
closet. “Meet me in the garage in one minute. If you don’t show in two, I’m
going to destroy the data and drive out of here.”

She found her
purse and grabbed her wallet. She rushed to the garage and popped open the
empty trunk of their white four-door sedan, a 2001 Acura Integra that Nathan
had driven just hours earlier to return her from the airport. It might have
been ancient, but it had a refurbished engine, had been well maintained, and
they had bought it for a song. Best of all, it was built before internal trunk
release levers had become a standard feature, so it would be perfect for her
needs.
 
 

By the time her
uninvited guest walked into the garage, she was as far away from the trunk as
possible, kneeling down, with the glass of wine on the floor before her, still
holding the thumb drive less than an inch above the red liquid.

 
“Get in the trunk and close it from the
inside,” she ordered.

“No fucking
way! You’ve lost your fucking mind!”

“I don’t think
so. Because now I have your gun. So do what I say, or I’ll not only destroy the
drive, but put enough holes in you to turn you into a
sieve
. I’ve been shooting since I was eight,” she lied. “My father
was a cop,” she added, also a fabrication.

“You’d better
hope I’m not the one who finds you,” he spat, and then lowered himself into the
Acura’s trunk. Once inside, one of his arms reached up and found a way to lower
the lid. Finally, there was a telltale click, indicating it was fully locked.

Jenna rushed
outside to the car she had stolen on Palomar Mountain. The Acura was serving as
a prison, and even if it weren’t, she felt safer taking a car that, at least
for the moment, no one knew was connected to her.

She took the
driver’s seat, shoved the flash drive into her pocket, and drank down the full
glass of wine in one prolonged gulp, wishing for just a moment that she had the
entire bottle with which to calm her raw, exposed nerves, and drown her sorrows.

6

Lee Cargill was bleary-eyed and
pissed off. More than pissed off. Seething.
Enraged
.

He paced in a cavernous room
filled with heavy equipment, part of a spacious facility that the Army Corps of
Engineers had dug out under the peak of Palomar Mountain during the
construction of the Hale Telescope in 1935, complete with meeting rooms and
lodging. It had been constructed in parallel with the Hale Observatory so the
construction work could go largely unnoticed.

God-
dammit
!
fumed Cargill.

He loved the Palomar facility.
It was ideally located near the top of a scenic mountain. Not only was the
facility itself spacious and well laid out, but at night he and his people
often ventured outside to enjoy the fresh air and a star field that blazed with
an amazing light, which was the very reason it had been chosen to be the home
of what had once been the most impressive telescope ever built.

But now everything had been
blown to hell. “Fuck you, Edgar Knight!” he shouted to an empty room.

Just as Cargill’s shout finished
reverberating around the walls, his second-in-command, Joe Allen, entered the
room with an expression as grim as his own. “The third team we sent in has
reported back,” he said.

“
And?
” barked Cargill impatiently.

“Almost everyone is dead. On
both sides. Every member of our initial extraction team was killed. And every
member of the teams we sent in response to their alarm. Only the helo pilot
survived, and his bird was badly damaged. Luckily, he managed to get it out of
there. Can you fucking imagine? If that thing had gone down, fire or no fire,
we’d have a headache the size of Texas.”

“We already have
that
,” snapped Cargill. “But yes, it
would have been even bigger.” He paused. “You’re certain no one else survived?”

“We think Jenna Morrison may
have, but we aren’t positive. Some of the bodies were pretty unrecognizable.”

“
Really?
” shouted Cargill. “Wasn’t she the only female? That should
be a big fucking clue, right?”

Joe Allen swallowed hard. “No
female bodies found yet,” he said. “She could be alive, or she could be dead
but not yet found. Maybe she was wounded and managed to leave the scene. We’re
still combing the woods.”

“Recognize anyone on their
side?”

“Not yet.”

“How do we know
everyone
from their side was killed?”

“We got counts of what the teams
were up against, and the dead body count matches what we expected.”

“But in the heat of battle, who
knows if one or more of the enemy was miscounted. So we can’t be sure none of
them escaped. And we can’t be sure they don’t have Jenna Morrison.”

“True, but that won’t help them.
Nathan Wexler and all traces of his work are gone. You could interrogate
Einstein’s wife all you wanted, but you wouldn’t get any new insights into
general relativity.”

“Thanks for that revelation,
Joe. Because I didn’t know that. I’m that fucking stupid.” He shook his head,
incensed. “This has to be the work of Edgar Knight. Has to be. To think I
called that prick my friend. I can’t fucking wait until my next report to the
president. We lost good men. Irreplaceable men. Knight should never have known
about this base. He split off from us before we moved here, and I know he
wasn’t aware this facility even existed, which is one of the reasons I chose
it.”

“We have a mole. It’s the only
explanation.”

“No kidding,” said Cargill. “One
who must have been with us from the beginning. Biding his time. Knight knew we
were here but figured a direct attack on this base would almost surely fail. He
must have decided to keep his powder dry, to piggyback off of our superior
intelligence capabilities and wait for us to discover something that would be a
game-changer.”

Allen nodded. “Which we just
did.”

“We were monitoring Wexler,” said
Cargill in disgust, “and Knight was monitoring
us.
”

He turned away, his eyes
blazing. “So now I can’t trust anyone, can I? How do I know
you
aren’t working for Edgar Knight for
Christ’s sake?”

“Come on, Lee. We’ve known each
other for too long. You know me. You know this isn’t true.”

Cargill’s features softened. “I
know that, Joe. I do. But I’m frazzled. And I
thought
I knew everyone on this team. But apparently I don’t.”

“So what now?”

“We have to evacuate and find a
new base. This base should be impregnable, and isn’t easy to sneak up on, so I
doubt we’re in any immediate danger. But I’ll never underestimate Edgar Knight
again.” Cargill scowled. “But, obviously, our first priority has to be rooting
out the man, or men, who have infiltrated our organization. Until we do that,
changing headquarters, or anything else we do for that matter, won’t mean
shit.”

7

Jenna drove to La Jolla Country
Day high school and parked in the center of its minotaur maze of buildings and
connecting lots. Only a few cars were present anywhere, left there overnight
for unknown reasons. It was now just after four in the morning.

She turned off the lights, shut
her eyes, and struggled to come up with a plan of action. But her mind refused.

She had been exhausted after
arriving home near midnight—two a.m. Chicago time—but it had now been almost
twenty-four hours since she had last slept. Her body had produced rivers of adrenaline
for the past several hours, but the effect was wearing off and she was crashing
hard.

She almost melted into the seat
of the car, waging a futile struggle to stay awake but drifting quickly into a
fitful sleep. Her eyes shot open less than an hour later and she shook her head
vigorously to bring herself fully back to consciousness.

But even this nap, short as it
was, was a godsend, and she now found she was able to remain awake and concentrate
once again. She didn’t need a full-length mirror to know she looked as though
she had been through a war, which she
had
been, and was covered in cuts, bruises, and blood, most of it not her own.

So now what?

Think!
she demanded of herself.

What should she do?

She decided to first take
inventory. The only useful items in her wallet were two twenties, an ATM card,
and a credit card, but she decided that she couldn’t risk using the credit card
until she knew what she was up against.

Her own cell phone had been confiscated
but she now had two others, one belonging to a chubby driver on Palomar Mountain
and one to a man she had sealed in the trunk of her car.

And she had two guns. A compact
submachine gun and a semi-automatic pistol.

First order of business, she decided,
was to get more money. She drove to a nearby ATM and withdrew five hundred from
savings, the maximum her bank would allow with one transaction. She then gassed
up the car at a station that was open all night before returning to the high
school parking lot to continue planning.

It was now nearly five thirty.
The sun would be coming up in less than an hour. How soon before the owner of
the car she was in managed to call in a report?

Should she beat him to the punch
and go to the police herself? The men who had taken her and Nathan didn’t seem
too troubled by the prospect of the local police being alerted that they were
being abducted. The spokesman of the kidnapping squad had specifically said so,
and she had believed him.

So did these men have the cops
in their pockets?

She couldn’t rule it out.
Whoever had taken them, and whoever had then tried to intervene with an ambush,
were almost certainly in positions of power—or at least whoever was backing
them was. Possibly even
legitimate
power. The kind of people who could have great influence with the police.

So going to the cops might be
playing right into their hands. She imagined sitting in a station while a friendly
detective left for a moment to get coffee, only to secretly alert her abductors
that the woman they had been looking for had arrived, as they had anticipated.

She shuddered at the thought.

And even if the cops were clean,
or couldn’t be influenced by either group, would she pull up to the station in
a
stolen car
?

And if she did, what would she
report?

If she told them the truth they
would think she was a lunatic. They would never believe her story.

And for good reason. She didn’t
believe her story either. And she had
lived
it.

She could produce the weapons
and cell phones she had taken, but that might just suggest she was deranged and
dangerous. This
could
work, but could
just as easily backfire. Badly.

So what
would
happen if she told the truth, described her and Nathan’s
abduction and subsequent events? If they didn’t take her a thousand percent
seriously they might not get around to checking her house for some time. When
they did, they’d either find a man in the trunk of her car, who surely would
claim she was a madwoman who had assaulted him, or, if he had escaped, a home
with no signs of forced entry, and aside from a dismantled computer, all
jewelry and other valuables still there. No sign of any struggle. And no sign
of Nathan.

So what then? They would tell
her that she was free to file a missing persons report. That after forty-eight
hours or so, if he didn’t turn up, they would begin to look into it.

There were other variations of
this she could conceive. The carnage on Palomar could come to light, but even
so Nathan wouldn’t be recognizable, and his phone and wallet weren’t on his
corpse to identify him. And if the Hostess truck was found, federal agencies
would push the local cops aside, anyway, shutting them out of the case.

If Palomar Mountain did come
into play, how long before the driver she had accosted described the crazed commando
woman who had threatened him with a submachine gun? Hell, if this were to
happen she could well become the chief
suspect
in Nathan’s murder—when the authorities finally got around to figuring out that
he was dead.

While all this was going on, the
people working with trunk-man would be after her. And her identity and
whereabouts would be logged into the police system, which she wouldn’t trust to
protect her.

So best case nothing would
happen for days.

Worst case, this would blow up
in her face.

So the cops were definitely out.
And the more she thought about it, the more she realized they would be out even
if none of her reasoning were true, and they genuinely believed her and tried
to help from the start.

Because they’d be hopelessly out
of their league. Going to them would be like counting on a golden retriever
puppy to protect her from a pack of wolves.

So where could she turn?

After several more minutes of
thought, she came up with a way forward. Not great, but under the circumstances
anything that wasn’t absolutely disastrous was inspired.

She would hire a private
detective. The most bad-ass detective she could find. Those looking for her
might easily manage to put out notices to police forces, having them be on the
lookout for her and shaping reality in any way they saw fit.

But a private detective would be
well out of this loop. Far safer. Far more anonymous.

But she couldn’t stay in La
Jolla. That would be just asking for trouble.

In a flash of insight it became
clear where she needed to go, and what she needed to do.

If she couldn’t immediately
unlock the thumb drive, she could at least learn the gist of Nathan’s
discovery. He had only told one person: Dan Walsh. In the e-mail that had
almost certainly set this firestorm in motion.

But she would need to meet with
Dan in person. She had to assume his phone and computer were bugged. She needed
to know what he knew, and alert him to the probable danger he was in.

She decided she would recruit a
private investigator first. One located in LA, and thus much closer to the UCLA
campus and Nathan’s physicist friend.

It took thirty minutes of
frantic searching through the Web, through dozens and dozens of agencies, but
she finally found a man who seemed perfect for her needs, a man named Aaron Blake,
and scoured his website for an additional five minutes.

He was a highly decorated ex-Army Ranger,
seventy-fifth regiment, who had served within various counter-terrorism groups
in Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq. Jenna Googled the
75th Ranger Regiment and learned this was an
elite special
operations force headquartered at Fort Benning, Georgia, and tasked with a
variety of special operations missions.

Impressive, to say the least.

Only three months earlier, Blake
had left the service and hung up his shingle in LA as a private investigator.
He listed his qualifications, which were impressive, but most importantly to
Jenna, he could handle himself in a gunfight and under extreme pressure,
something that seemed likely given the events of the past six hours.

He couldn’t be more ideal for
what she was looking for. Maybe her luck was beginning to change.

Finally with a plan in mind,
Jenna Morrison took a deep breath, started her stolen car, and began the drive
that would lead her to a face-to-face meeting with an ex-Army Ranger.

Now all she had to do was get
him to believe her story.