The Senator: A Blake Jordan Thriller (13 page)

The door popped open. I was in. I knew I wouldn’t have much time before the agents down the street got here. I didn’t know if they knew where my exact location was or not. But it didn’t matter. They were here.

I walked into the warehouse with my gun drawn and found myself inside of a large, empty bay area. It was definitely big enough to fit the van. But it wasn’t here. The only thing inside was a generator that was lighting the area. After clearing the room, I glanced at the concrete floor and found something unsettling.

A trail of smeared blood led from somewhere inside the warehouse to where I was standing.
Was this Jim Keller’s blood? Had the black van been parked inside the bay and if so, where was it now?
I realized that the trail of blood wasn’t going
into
the warehouse. It was coming from inside. Keller had been beaten or maybe killed, dragged into the van, and taken away from here.

If the van had passed Jami and me as we approached, I would have noticed. If the kidnapper had gotten away, I couldn’t be sure when he may have left. It could have been last night for all I knew. I stood there trying to put the pieces together in my head and understand what may have happened.
What could have spooked the kidnapper to make him want to leave? If he had killed David Mitchell because he knew his address, why would he feel like he couldn’t stay in this spot any longer? Did he know that the FBI had Mitchell’s laptop and was he worried that they would find his address – was that why he left so quickly?

“Damn,” I said under my breath, hoping that I was wrong and that Keller was still in the building somewhere.

I kept pressing forward, walking beside the trail of blood, past the generator and through another door that led to a small hallway. I passed a room that looked like a makeshift office or command center. I entered inside slowly and quietly, the heavy rain outside muting the sound of my footsteps. It was helping me move around without making much noise, but it also meant that I wouldn’t be able to hear if someone was moving toward me, either. I confirmed that the room was clear and I moved on.

I stepped back into the hallway and found a bloody handprint on the wall in front of me, as if the person being dragged was trying to brace himself and stand up. That gave me hope that Keller may have still been alive when he was dragged out of here, if that was what had happened. I touched the blood with my finger and it came off of the wall easily. It was fresh, no more than thirty minutes old.
I had just missed them.

There was a lantern turned on inside of the larger room, the same kind that I had seen in the room that I thought the kidnapper had been working from. The lantern in that room was turned off for some reason.
Maybe he was sleeping when something happened
, I thought to myself as my mind raced and I tried to put the puzzle together.

The lantern was bright and lit up the room but the hallway that took me there was dark, damp, and cold.

This room was much larger. I looked all around as I walked inside. The ceilings were high, ten feet maybe. Besides the lantern, there wasn’t anything else inside. I looked down again and followed the smeared blood from the hallway and saw that it led all the way to the edge of the wall inside of the room that I had walked into. The trail ended next to a long metal pipe that came down from the ceiling and exited outside at the base of the wall.
This is where he was being kept
, I thought and wondered where Keller was now. The pipe had scratches on it in one section. I wondered if the senator had been handcuffed to it.

Suddenly, I heard a noise from behind me.

I turned around, cocked my gun, and pointed it in the direction of the next room that I hadn’t been to yet.

“Blake?” I heard Jami yell and I lowered my weapon.

“In here,” I yelled back.

“Clear,” she said as she walked in, letting me know that the area that she had walked through was secure. She was drenched from the rain and holstered her weapon when she walked in. “Oh my God,” Jami said as she looked at the blood on the floor and followed the trail past where I was standing and saw that it continued down the hallway.

“He’s not here,” I said and Jami closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

“I’m sorry.”

Jami walked around the warehouse, examining everything she could see. “Whoever was here wasn’t planning on staying long,” she said, seeing how bare the place was.

“If we had DDC’s support, we would have been able to call the address in, had a satellite repositioned to send a feed to my phone. Maybe we could have followed the kidnapper wherever he had gone.”

“I know, Blake. Morgan could have done that, no problem.” She walked further down the hall, following the trail of blood.

“It’s fresh,” I said. “There’s a print on the wall, I’m sure it’s from him. It’s still wet. They left right before we got here, no more than half an hour ago.” Jami looked at the print and walked into the next room. “I saw some agents arrive right before I came in. They were just down the street. They’re going building to building. They’ll be here soon.” Jami nodded.

I stayed inspecting the area where I was sure the senator had been kept while Jami looked around. I stood next to the metal pipe, and looked at the entire room from where Keller would have been chained, looking for clues and grasping at straws.
He would have left me a sign if he could
, I thought to myself.

“Blake, you need to see this,” Jami said.

When I walked in, I saw that she was holding a flash drive. “I lifted up the air mattress and found this,” she said and handed it to me. I looked around the room more closely than I had the first time I went through. There were two monitors on a desk with a docking station but no laptop. The kidnapper had left in a hurry and in the rush he had lost the drive. We started turning everything over, looking for more clues.

“If we had access to Morgan still, we could have him scan it and maybe figure out who this guy is,” I said.

Jami thought for a moment. “I know someone who can help us,” she said and just then we heard a noise from the warehouse bay. We looked and saw a bright light. It was the door opening.
They were here.

“Go. I’ll stall them. Find out what’s on this,” I said, handing her the drive. As she took it, Jami placed her other hand on top of mine and squeezed. Her way of letting me know that we would be okay after the dust settled. I smiled and handed her the keys to the car. Just as she grabbed them, one of the men spoke.

“Blake Jordan – we know you’re here. Come out with your hands up,” I heard a man yell and his voice echoed throughout the empty building.

“Go,” I said again and Jami ran off and headed out the back exit.

Jami was now my only hope. And whatever might be on that flash drive – if anything – was the only thing that could save Senator Keller now. As I saw Jami disappear, I knelt down in the same spot where I knew my friend and mentor had been chained over the last twelve hours. My hands would now be tied as well. There was no way out of this and I knew that in a moment, I would be arrested and turned over to Roger Shapiro.

I put my hands behind my head and faced down. Four men rushed in and two pointed their guns at me. One just stood there, the man in charge of the operation, I assumed. It was the FBI. One of the men grabbed my hands and pulled them behind my back and handcuffed me. And that’s when I noticed it. That metal pipe, just to the left of the scratches that I knew had come from Keller’s own handcuffs, was another marking. There were initials scratched on the pipe. I blinked to refocus my eyes. It read:
ML
.

“I’ve got Jordan,” I heard the man standing in front of me say into his earpiece. A few seconds later, I heard more cars pull up and park outside of the building. The heavy downpour outside had turned into a light drizzle, making it easier to hear what was going on outside of the warehouse walls.

“You need to let me go,” I said. “Please. Senator Keller is in trouble. I believe he was severely beaten before being dragged out of here.” The man stepped closer to me.

“But we worked so hard to find you,” he said. I looked at the agents to my side then back at the man.

“So that was you tracking me. How did you know about the warehouse? Drone?” The man looked confused.

“It didn’t get that far. DDC contacted us a short while ago and let us know that you had gone off the grid. I spoke with Roger Shapiro, do you know him?” he asked me and flashed a sarcastic smile at me. “He said he tried to locate you but couldn’t. He said he needed our help. So why did you go dark, Agent Jordan?”

“I was being tracked. I removed the battery in my phone. So if you weren’t tracking me, how did you know to come here?” I asked, hoping to get more information from the man.

“A kid tipped us off. He said that he was here with the senator and escaped. He called the police and told them he knew where the senator was. We came straight here and also sent a car to bring him here to identify the building. But we got here first and that’s when we saw your car parked a block away. We called it in and confirmed that it was yours.”

The operative put his arms behind his back and paced the room. “How did
you
know that Keller was here?”

I could tell by the expression on his face and the tone of his voice that the man thought I might be involved in the kidnapping somehow. I thought about it from the FBI’s perspective. I had been in charge of security detail for the senator and he was taken while under my watch. We were asked to step back and disengage from the operation but I didn’t. I went dark and showed up here, were Keller had been held.

My thoughts went back to Jami.
If more agents were showing up outside, would she have been able to get past them?
“Jordan – did you hear me? How did you know that Senator Keller was being held here?” I decided that telling the man some of what I knew might help. At this point, I had nothing to lose. There was absolutely no way out of this. I decided I’d give him part of the information and ask to be involved.

“I followed the clues. I tracked down a man who I thought might be involved. I got the address from him.” The man stopped pacing the floor and turned to me.

“And who is this man?” I shook my head.

“He’s not involved. Listen, I’ll tell you everything I know, but you have to let me work with you. I can find Keller.”

“That’s not going to happen.” There was a certain respect our agencies were supposed to maintain. Restraining each other wasn’t part of the rules of engagement that we were required to follow. As head of DDC Chicago, being restrained was out of line. The FBI could trump us on decisions, but this was getting out of control.

“I’m the special agent in charge of DDC – let me go right now!” I yelled.

“You were,” the man said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You
were
the special agent in charge. You’ve been relieved of your duties, Mr. Jordan. I’ve been asked to turn you over to Shapiro. After we’re done with you, that is.”

I looked past the man when I heard footsteps coming from inside the bay. It was Jami. “Look what we found,” an agent said, walking behind her. Jami was handcuffed and told to have a seat next to me. “She had this on her,” the operative said and handed the flash drive over to the agent I had been talking with.

Jami knelt down next to me. I kept my eyes on the man holding the flash drive and felt her eyes on me.

“I’m sorry, Blake,” Jami whispered.

“And who is this?” the man in charge asked me.

“Agent Jami Davis, DDC,” Jami said before looking back at me. The man stepped closer and knelt down in front of us.

“What’s on the flash drive, Agent Davis?” Jami shook her head slowly before responding.

“I don’t know. We found it in the room next to us.” The man stood up and started pacing the floor again.

“Let me guess. Agent Jordan tried to distract us by letting us arrest him. That’s why he was here when we entered and not with you. He wanted us to find him so that you could get away with this,” he said, holding the flash drive up in the air. “Is that about right?” Jami looked down. I could see her eyes fixed on the metal pipe in front of us and I wondered if she noticed the initials scratched into the pipe like I had.

“Sounds like obstruction of justice to me,” the man in charge said to us. “Maybe we can throw a tampering with evidence charge on there, just for fun,” he continued before giving one of the agents standing behind me an order. “Take them away,” he said and the agent helped Jami and me get to our feet.

“You’re making a big mistake,” I said. “Let me help you. I know Jim Keller better than anyone else here. The man’s a former SEAL. He would have left clues to help us find him,” I said and looked at Jami to see if she might know what I was talking about. She held her composure, but I saw a slight nod in response.

The man took a step closer to us. “What you don’t seem to understand is that we know everything you know. We’ll use one of the interagency satellites to retrace your steps and figure out where you came from before you drove here. I’m assuming the person who gave you the address of the warehouse. We’ll keep retracing every step you took, all the way back to eight o’clock last night when Senator Keller disappeared.”

I thought about Mitchell’s apartment. If he didn’t know already that I had the journalist’s laptop and cell phone, I figured that he would after seeing that I had driven to the location. The FBI would piece together that I would have had to have taken something from the apartment to get Burnett’s location.

That would be another count for tampering with evidence. I felt my body tense up at the realization.

The only way to avoid all of this would be to get back on the case. To convince them to let me help them. Not to save myself but to buy some time so that I could find Jim Keller before it was too late.

But the man who showed up hoping to find the senator and now in charge of bringing me in wasn’t open to even considering it. There seemed to be nothing I could say or do to change his mind.

“Go,” he said to the agent standing behind Jami and me and we started walking.

We were taken down the hallway and walked alongside the smear of Keller’s blood that lined the way. I glanced again inside the kidnapper’s room, knowing it would be the last time I’d see it, desperately looking for anything else that might tell me where the senator had been taken. We walked past the generator in the bay that was still running and the agent walked us to his SUV and opened the back door.

The operative helped Jami inside and I followed. Then he slammed the door and walked back inside the warehouse.

“Did you see it?” I asked Jami while we had a few minutes alone.

“Yes, ML – what do you think it means?” I thought for a moment.

“The FBI wasn’t tracking us. A kid was here with Keller for some reason. He escaped and called the police. Maybe it’s his initials.”

“Who do you think was tracking you?”

“Maybe DDC.”

“Maybe the kidnapper,” Jami added. “Blake, how are we going to get out of this?” I looked out the backseat window.

“I don’t know yet.”