Capturing Kate (4 page)

“We’re at a safe house. It’s not an official FBI location, but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. It’s a cabin I own, off the grid. When Connor told me he had you, we needed a close place to stash you.”

“I’m not furniture. You don’t stash me!” She fought against the bonds. “I want to go home.”

“And I said no. Right now, I’m your boss, the one in charge. You’re going to do what I say, when I say it, and that will keep you alive.”

She shuddered. “You’re horrible.”

“My team saved your life,” he corrected. “I think a thank you is in order.”

“A thank you?” She pulled so hard at the bonds that she felt her wrists rub raw. “How about a fuck you to hell and back, you shithead asshole? Your friend back there could have stopped those men and let me go. He could have saved Ella! She was having a heart attack, I think, when he grabbed me. Instead, he brought me here in the trunk of a car and you’re keeping me tied up like a slave. Now let me go right now, and we can go to the police, and you can make your fucking FBI report and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

“It’s not that easy.” He pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed. “If you show up again, Mancini will find out, and he’ll hire someone else to take you out. And then our cover is blown, and with it, all the work we’ve done to infiltrate over the past year. You need to stay out of sight until the case is closed. And that’s why I can’t untie you just yet. I need to be sure you won’t run away from me. We need to close him down first.”

“For the water plant?” Her brow wrinkled. “I can help! I’ve been researching for months now. Ella is my source on the inside! Let me go and I’ll help you. I can give you all of my data. I’m so close to having what I need to prove he knew the plant was putting out contaminated water to the poorer side of town. With my information, you can arrest him. Tell the local police, and they’ll have to do it.”

“The water plant?” He crossed his arms. “No. That’s not what we want Mancini.”

“Then I don’t understand.” She blinked. “Why?”

“He has other ventures.”

“Like what?”

“You don’t need to know that right now.”

“Maybe I don’t need to, but I deserve to.” She stared at him. “Right now, I don’t even know if believe anything you’re saying. You could be part of Mancini’s team.”

He shook his head. “No. His water plant, and the one he owns upstream, the chemical plant, those are his legitimate businesses. He uses them to look respectable and hide his real work.”

“Hide… what?”

“Kate, you’ll sign a nondisclosure later that will be legally binding. If you talk about this, it means federal prison. Do you understand?”

She nodded. A nondisclosure meant she wouldn’t be dead. She couldn’t fucking wait for that moment to come, when this was all behind her. “Yes.”

“He sells weapons on the international black market, and his deals have gotten bigger. We could take him down right now on what we have, but. It’s more complicated. We think he’ll be brokering a deal for some nuclear material. It’s going down next week, and if can get into the auction as a buyer or as part of his team, we can take him down as soon as he finishes the auction on the dark web.”

“Nuclear material?” Stunned, she blinked at him. “But he owns factories. Breaks EPA rules.”

“It’s not that we don’t care about his dirty water, okay? This is more critical. This is a sale of enriched uranium to terrorists. Do you have the slightest concept of how deadly that could be for any and every city in the world?” He didn’t phrase it like a question.

“But you’re not sure he’s involved in the auction?”

“Pretty sure from the chatter we’ve analyzed. We need to find the information that will let us get into the auction. We have some of the best hackers in the world, and some contacts in the underworld, so far they’ve been able to keep all traces of the entry point hidden.” His voice was frustrated. “He contacts his potential clients through secure methods. He’s the broker for this deal. We need the seller and the eventual buyer. We’re willing to let him think he’s free until we get them.”

“Sloan, but the water plant is important. He hurt a lot of people, including Ella and her grandson. Don’t you care about the people who drank, and are still drinking, that contaminated water? I need to get my article out there so we can stop him before he makes more people sick. You don’t even know for sure if he’s even selling the nuclear thing, but I am positive about his plant. I can show you! We need to go public and shut him down, at least get him investigated. Then you’d have him and could, you know, interrogate him. Make him tell you stuff about the auction. If I could just have my laptop—”

“That’s gone. They took it at the park with your purse.”

“No! I have another one, it’s on my desk at home, it’s—”

“Kate, it’s gone. Understand? They’ve been to your house. The data is long gone. All of it. And any backups you have, even on the cloud. They’ve wiped you clean. And whatever Ella had? That’s gone, too.”

She shuddered. “God. Can’t you just call in the cavalry? Like, a thousand men in black SUVs with machine guns? Take him down and torture him and make him tell you about the nuclear stuff?”

His voice was taut. “We don’t just want him. We want his buyer, his seller. The other bidders. Sure, we could take him. If we do? They disappear forever, and our hunt starts over from zero—and the nuclear material will still be out there, changing hands, somewhere we don’t know about. He needs to know that his life is proceeding right on plan all the way up until that auction starts and ends. And my team needs to be there when it does.”

“I don’t even understand why he’d want to—kill me.” Her voice cracked. “I was so careful. I swear I didn’t tell anyone besides my boss what I was working on. And Ella was careful, too. And if you’re right, that the water is nothing to him compared to him other… deals, then why even bother with me?”

He looked at her evenly. “He was keeping an eye on you because of your public stance on the corruption at the plant, and your lead-up articles. I suspect he knew you had someone inside the plant, and he figured out it was Ella. He must have gotten to her, made her confess to whistleblowing and handing you all the data. That’s when he decided to take you out, and he used her to set you up.”

“But why?”

“That’s what has me confused. He can make the water plant issues go away easily. So having him suddenly, on such short notice, decide that you are a threat that needs immediate action, especially when he has a huge arms deal looming? It makes me curious.”

He gazed at her until she got even less comfortable. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“What do you know about him apart from the water plant stuff?”

“What? Nothing!” She sat up straight, leaned forward. “Not a damn thing, but the information I do have was not easily won, okay? Do not dare trivialize what I had to do, what I had to say, to get Ella to talk to me and work with me. And now she’s…” She started crying.

“I just wonder, Kate, why you’re a threat to him.” His voice was even but something in it was steel.

“I have no idea.” She wiped at her face with both hands. “Sloan, how the hell should I know? I’m a reporter, okay? A good one, but nothing else. I’m—what the hell are you thinking? Do you think I’m in his dirty gang or something? Is that what you think? For all I know,
you’re
in his gang.” Anger made her voice loud, harsh, and she started coughing.

He handed her the water and she drank deeply, until the bottle wheezed and gasped when she let it go, sucking air back into the vacuum.

“I don’t think anything right now. I just told you I’m curious.”

“Well, I’m curious, too. I’m curious about—I mean, what’s going to happen to Ella?” She had meant to yell at him, say something sarcastic and bitter, but her worries poured out. “She didn’t look—back there? Is she going to make it?”

He didn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t know. I’m very sorry, Kate.”

“Can’t you find where they took her? I don’t think they’re going to help Eli. You can’t reverse what happened to him. They tricked her, and I think they’re going to kill her.” Tears bubbled up in her eyes. “She didn’t mean to hurt me, I know it.”

“Like I said, we need to give him a sense of comfort that nothing is out of place.”

“So you know they plan to kill her, and you’re not going to do anything?”

“There are agents on it. If she’s still alive, they will do their best to extract her safely. But we can’t tip off Mancini.” Anguish flashed on his face before it closed again. “Not until the auction. And you—” He broke off.

“What will happen to me?” Kate felt fear rise again.

“You got lucky. You need to stay out of the way, which is why I brought you here.”

“I mean, after.” She blinked at him.

He looked away. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. My job is to keep you safe for the duration of the operation, keep you out of harm’s way. If we can get another copy of the data, I’ll let you continue working on it—but I won’t let you go public until the right time.”

“But you said it was all wiped out.”

“I think Ella hid a copy somewhere for you.”

Kate thought about the thing Ella had pushed into her hand and forced herself not to look down at her hip. Was it still even there? God only knew. She bit her lip. “Why would she do that?”

“She was being forced to betray you, Kate. But she had no love for Mancini. She’s a smart woman, and she knows the value of multiple data sources. My gut tells me that she hid a copy of the data somewhere, and she wants you to find it. That’s why she said that to you. About following your heart to find the truth. Connor told me she said it more than once.”

“That could mean guilt. Or babbling. She was out of her mind.” In retrospect, Kate could see the terror in Ella’s whole body.

Sloan pursed his lips. “I need you to think, Kate. Where would Ella hide data for you? She wanted you to have something, either something physical, or some information. We need that.”

“Why do you care?” Her voice rose high and thin. “You don’t even care about the water plant stuff.”

“Maybe Ella stumbled across something at the plant that was about more than lead and carcinogens in the water supply. Maybe she didn’t even know what she had, and was just blindly passing along anything even vaguely suspicious. That might be what tipped Mancini over the edge to take you out. She didn’t know what she found, but he did. And it was too valuable to let it out.”

“Whatever.”

But Ella had been acting nervous lately, flinching at noises, darting her eyes around. She was no actress. And her typical handovers included lots of random memos in addition to data. Kate bit her lip. What had Ella found?

“Kate. Are you thinking? If you can pinpoint a location where Ella might have hidden something for you, we need to get there as soon as the weather permits. Or I can get a different agent on it. This storm is a—” He got up to peer out the window, where a tremendous flash and a crack loud enough to hurt her ears rang out. “Shit!” He stepped back. “That was the bigger willow from out front. Lucky it didn’t block my pickup. Jesus. This storm is out of control.”

Kate tried to focus. If only she could get back to her home, so she could think of a plan that was better than just hiding out and… waiting. She needed to think.

Her body had needs, too. “I need to be untied to use the bathroom. If you don’t, I’m going to have a panic attack and pee on myself, I’m not joking. I really am.”

He pursed his lips. “Only if you don’t run. If you tried right now, it wouldn’t be smart. The lightning is on top of us, the road is washed out, and the keys are in a place you will not find them.” He gave her a dark stare. “With your injury, you wouldn’t make it far.” At his expression, a frisson of fear tickled her spine. “If you hit me or kick me, I tie you up again. You try to run, I tie you up. Got it? I am stronger and faster than you are, and I’m armed. I promise you, I will win in a struggle. But if you behave? I will untie you.”

Kate held her breath. Could it really be this simple? “Yes.” She looked straight into his eyes, making hers wide and believable. “I promise not to run.”

She nodded, licking her lips, adrenaline surging. As soon as he let her go, she’d make a break for it. Fuck the weather, and her leg, and the hidden keys. She could hide in the woods and wait. She shifted, and her leg twinged, once and again, stronger. She hissed out her breath. The lidocaine was wearing off and suddenly a veil of exhaustion settled over her body.

Maybe she should find the car keys when he was asleep. He’d need to sleep eventually. Then she could take the car, escape for real, go to the police. They could protect her. She wasn’t even sure she believed a word he was saying. A real FBI agent wouldn’t leave her tied to a bed, would he? They’d be in some fancy office somewhere, offering her coffee and sympathy.

Maybe he was working for Mancini, too. Maybe he was supposed to tie her up, lie to her, get her to be all Stockholm-y with his handsome face and sexy muscles, with those gorgeous blue eyes and kissable lips, and get every last scrap of information from her. Then he’d finish her off using torture to make sure there were no loose ends, no other people who knew what she knew, and then he’d kill her. If Mancini was smart, he’d be savvy enough to do some trickery like that.

Yes. She’d play nice, bide her time, and escape.

Chapter Four

First, though, she really did need the bathroom, with an urgency that was painful, her bladder nearly giving way right there as he stood her up. At first she was lightheaded and he held her for support until she regained her balance. He walked with her, holding her shoulders.

“The bathroom is down the hall. I’ll untie your hands when we get there.” She nodded again. “Okay.” The only thing she could think about was not peeing on herself, and the minute he loosened her wrists, she burst into the bathroom and threw herself onto the toilet, sobbing in relief. It had never felt so good to urinate, and she let herself enjoy the pure satisfaction of release, the lessening of pain in her bladder, the shuddering shake of completion.