The Stolen Girl (15 page)

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A
bout an hour previously, Leonard Sterling’s cell phone had rung. He picked it up, and this time, he recognized the number that was calling.

“Hi, Carol,” he said, swiping his finger across. “Is there any news?”

He wasn’t expecting much of an answer. But to his surprise, Carol’s voice on the other end was immediate, and she sounded like she was a combination of stressed, on edge, and… excited? “Yes!” she nearly yelled into the phone. “We have a signal!”

“A signal?”

“We just received a set of blackmail photos,” Carol began.

Sterling gasped. “Blackmail!?” That meant that his daughter truly had been abducted - she hadn’t simply run away or gotten lost! But if there were photos, that also meant that she was alive, he quickly realized. There was still hope!

“Yes, blackmail photos. Pretty standard, girl in front of a blank wall, holding up a national newspaper with today’s date. But whoever sent them didn’t put enough encryption on their signal - they sent the pictures over a cellular data network, which lets us determine an approximate location. And there just happens to be a fairly well-known motorcycle gang in that area, one that owns a large house which they use for parties and storing items. We’re on our way now.”

For the first time in what felt like weeks, the senator felt a surge of hope, real, supported hope, bloom inside his chest. He made an immediate decision. “Pick me up,” he ordered.

At the other end of the line, Carol paused. “Listen,” she began after a moment. “This could be a very tense situation. It might be best for you to wait and see-”

“No,” Sterling insisted, cutting her off. He injected every drop of political authority into his voice that he could muster. “She is my daughter, and I promised that I would be there for her no matter what. You’re going to pick me up and take me with you. I’m not budging on this, Agent Gates.”

He hoped that dropping the formal name would emphasize his point. Despite still feeling aftershocks from that intense surge of attraction to this woman, he had the connections to have her demoted or worse, and he intended to, for the first time in his career, squeeze every last drop out of his political clout.

Carol let out a sigh, but she relented. “Okay, I’ll send a car around to pick you up,” she said at length. “It’s about forty minutes away from here, so the ride will take a while. Don’t talk to anyone.”

Sterling promised to keep his mouth shut, and true to the agent’s word, a car pulled up at his home in under ten minutes. Sterling climbed into the back seat, and suppressed the slight pang of disappointment that Carol wasn’t waiting there for him. But, of course, she had taken a separate car, aiming to get to the possible place where his daughter was being held as rapidly as possible, in case the abductors decided to move.

Once the senator was in the car, the driver, a young man with mirrored aviators covering his face, stepped on the gas pedal heavily and they leapt away from the curb. Sterling sat in the back, his seat belt fastened and his eyes closed, and for the first time in a long time, the man prayed. He prayed to anyone who was listening, to God, to Jesus, that his daughter would be safely returned to him. And with his eyes closed and his head bowed slightly, the car sped towards the house where his daughter’s kidnappers may be at this very moment.

Carol had predicted that it would take the car forty minutes to reach the house, but the driver behind the sunglasses clearly had different ideas. Barely thirty minutes later, he pulled off the highway, swerving down a couple of side roads before pulling into a small building with a couple of black-and-white police cars parked outside. Through the windows, Sterling could see several people standing in a rough circle outside the station, most of them clad in SWAT armor with “FBI” plastered across the back of their shoulder blades.

The senator clambered out of the back seat and hurried over. One of the individuals in the group looked shorter than the men around her, and she wore an FBI issued windbreaker below her blonde hair, tossed lightly by a breeze. She turned at the sound of Sterling’s steps.

For just an instant, a heartwarming smile bloomed across Carol’s face as she laid eyes on him, and despite the negative emotions currently suffusing his mind, Sterling couldn’t help smiling back. Even now, she looked beautiful, a sharp and dangerous jewel. Her windbreaker was pushed back at the hip, revealing both the tightness of her slacks and the firearm strapped to her side.

But the smile on her face only lasted for a moment, and was then replaced by icy cold determination. “So, our plan is clear,” she reiterated, turning back to the SWAT officers after giving Sterling a nod of acknowledgment. “We will approach with as much stealth as possible, unless there is contact. If we do have contact, we move in fast, looking to cut them off and take them off guard. Is that understood?”

The men around her nodded their assent, and they began shuffling away, some of them performing last-minute checks on the weapons slung over their shoulders or strapped at their sides. Carol watched them for a moment, her hands planted on her hips, and then she turned to Sterling as he stepped up next to her.

“We think that we can catch them off guard,” she explained, not bothering with small talk. “It’s early morning, and we just got reports that a couple of gang members are headed out of the building, probably to gather supplies. It doesn’t sound like they’re about to leave. We can move in and catch them before they realize that they’ve been found, and hopefully recover your daughter without any complications.”

“So what am I going to do?” the senator asked.

Carol lifted her hand, paused for a moment as if reconsidering, but then went ahead and patted Sterling on the chest. “I’ll let you come up to the perimeter,” she gave in, rubbing her hand back and forth across his tight muscles. “But I can’t let you come up any further. I have to think about your safety just as much as anyone else’s. Maybe even more.”

Despite wanting to be at the very edge of the action, a tiny part of him overcome with bravado and wanting to grab a weapon and charge into the house at the front of the team, Sterling knew that Carol was making the right call. “Okay,” he agreed, and for just a moment, while no one was looking, he ran his hand down the small of her back.

The touch made the FBI agent shiver slightly, and a tiny smile danced around the edges of her lips. “Then you’re coming with me,” she said, pointing towards one of the police cars. Sterling walked with her and opened the passenger door. But before he could climb in, he heard a shout from behind him, and turned to see what was happening.

A pair of bikers had decided to turn down the street, and as they had passed in front of the station, one of the SWAT officers must have recognized a gang member. Or perhaps vice versa. In any case, one of the men brought up his weapon, what looked like a six-shot grenade launcher, and fired a shot as Sterling watched in horror.

The shot flew as a black streak across the road and connected with one of the bikers, a very large and obese black man with a shaved head. The round must have been some sort of bean bag, but it still had enough force to spin the man around at the shoulder, knocking his hands free of the controls. He tumbled off the bike, rolling to a dusty stop on the side of the road, and the bike, now free of a rider, shot across the oncoming line and landed in a ditch on the far side with a loud crunch.

The other man, his head turned and his mouth open as he saw his partner physically thrown from his ride, gunned the chopper between his knees. The SWAT officer who had fired the bean bag brought his gun around, but his shot went wide, and the biker roared around a corner and out of sight.

“Shit!” Carol cursed, the words imbued with surprising ferocity. She grabbed a walkie talkie from her belt and began barking orders into it while climbing into the squad car. She turned over the engine without waiting for Sterling, and he quickly pulled himself into the passenger seat.

“Our cover’s blown,” she spat out between commands issued into the two-way radio, pulling the car into gear and flooring it out of the lot. Her fingers flicked a switch and the sirens atop the squad car lit up and howled into life. “We can’t catch that guy, not this close, and he’s going to sound the alarm when he gets back. If we don’t move in now, they’ll either vanish, or they’ll set up defensible positions.”

The car roared around the small and empty streets of the small town, heading along the same route that the biker had taken. In between fumbling for his seat belt, Sterling risked a quick look over his shoulder, out the back of the squad car. One of the other men had gone running across the road to grab the fat man knocked off his bike, but the rest had climbed into their own vehicles and were close behind, their own lights and sirens activated as well.

Carol must have had the accelerator pedal mashed all the way to the floor, and was focusing far more on speed than on precision in her driving. Sterling clung to the handle of the door and gritted his teeth as they went over bump after bump. It was too loud to pray, to do anything but keep his eyes peeled and try not to get in the way.

Less than five minutes later, they pulled up outside of a large but decaying house, multiple stories tall, covered in wood siding and peeling paint. There were at least a dozen motorcycles parked outside, and although the house was quiet, they arrived just in time to see that biker they had been following disappear into the front door.

Throwing the car into park but not even bothering to turn it off, Carol climbed out, once again barking orders into her walkie talkie. The other cars were pulling up as well, and the SWAT officers hurried around the house, setting up a perimeter. Several of them took positions behind the parked cars, training their weapons on the front door. The air was filled with tension, so thick that Sterling felt as though he was in a fog. But as the men took their positions, he realized that this wasn’t a storming attack on the enemy castle.

This was a waiting game.

Making sure to keep behind the barrier of the parked cars, Sterling hurried over to Carol, a few feet away. “Now what?” he asked in a low voice.

Carol opened her mouth to reply, but before she could speak, a low crack echoed through the air, clearly audible even above the still-wailing sirens of the emergency vehicles. Sterling saw Carol’s eyes widen slightly and one of her hands flew down to grab at her sidearm. “Shots fired inside the house!” she yelled into the receiver in her other hand, and she bolted forward, towards the front door.

The other men, gathered around, immediately had their weapons up to their shoulders, barreled trained forward. They hurried after the slim female FBI agent, kicking the front door of the house open and charging inside. After the officers in body armor had entered, Carol followed. A moment later, Sterling was alone, standing helplessly outside the house.

He managed to stay behind the car for nearly two minutes. And then, offering up one last, silent, fervent prayer, he strode past the parked cars and up the stairs of the porch, entering the house.

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T
he gun barked loudly, its report immediate, and it jerked backward in my hands. The sound of the shot echoed inside the room, bouncing back at me from the walls and ceiling. And in front of me, Slammer’s expression turned from rage to pain, and he collapsed forward.

“You shot me!” he exclaimed, sounding half-shocked that I had actually gone through with my threat. His right knee hit the ground heavily as his hands went to the hole in his left thigh, already soaking his pants with blood.

I didn't know how to respond, and so I simply stood there in shock. The gun was still in my hand, but it drooped down as the man collapsed onto the floor. I could still feel the roughly vibrating shock of the gun's firing echoing in the muscles of my arms.

At the sound of the gunshot, there had been the thud of many footsteps, and the rest of the bikers had come running out of the kitchen and down from the stairs. I glanced up at them and saw a litany of expressions painted across their faces. Shock from the biker with the glasses, Cable, confusion on Chainz's skinny face, and strangely enough, a hint of grim satisfaction on Flamer's face below her burning red hair. They stopped at the edge of the room, not approaching me but instead silently watching from the edges.

I opened my mouth to reply, to say something, anything, but before I could find the words to speak, there was another bang. I spun around to see the front door of the house go flying open, and a dozen men came plunging inside.

These were definitely not bikers. The men were dressed in body armor, with “SWAT” emblazoned across their chests. Many of them were holding weapons, which they had up and ready at their shoulders. As they entered, the men fanned out, most of them pointing their guns at the other bikers, Roads, Slammer, and myself. “Nobody move!” one of them shouted in a voice filled with adrenaline.

I froze, my muscles locking up. Oh, no. I was still holding a smoking pistol, with an injured man right in front of me! Was I going to be arrested for this? How could I explain that it was justified, what hell he had put me through?