The Senator: A Blake Jordan Thriller (5 page)

Inside the dark, cold, and dingy warehouse, Senator Jim Keller woke up once again to find himself handcuffed to what he thought was an old sewer line. He grabbed the metal pipe with both hands and pulled as hard as he could. It didn’t budge at all. He looked up and saw the pipe appear from somewhere in the banisters of the ceiling beyond where the dim light inside the room that the kidnapper had set up to illuminate the small area where he was sitting. Keller realized the pipe wasn’t going to budge, no matter what he did.

The senator’s vision and hearing were starting to improve as the effects of the chloroform wore off. He felt pain in his chest and looked down and found a small blood stain on his white dress shirt. Suddenly, he remembered a blurry vision of the Taser being pointed at him by a man wearing a ski mask, a thought that had somehow escaped him. He thought for a few minutes about his kidnapping. W
ho was the man and what was he planning on doing to him?

Keller looked around the room, scanning his environment as he had been trained to do many years ago.
Someone’s watching me
, he thought to himself after feeling like eyes were upon him but dismissed the thought as quickly as it had come. He couldn’t see anyone. Maybe there was a hidden camera set up by the kidnapper, but he couldn’t be sure. Keller’s cell was being lit by a battery-powered lantern, the kind an adult might bring to his kid’s Cub Scout camping trip to light the campground.

A moment later, the kidnapper walked in from the adjacent room which was also illuminated from what Keller figured was another lantern, although he could not see inside from the wall that he was secured to.

“Make yourself at home, Mr. Keller,” the man said. His voice was gruff and unnatural, almost like he was trying not to sound like himself. The kidnapper walked closer to the senator and stepped in front of the light coming from the lantern, a light so bright it had been almost blinding to him.

That’s when Keller saw that the kidnapper was wearing a black ski mask. Even if he hadn’t been wearing a mask, it would have been hard to see much of anything with the light to the kidnapper’s back and Keller’s current state. Keller could hardly remember the ride to wherever he was or how he even got in his cell. It was as if he had a collection of fuzzy memories that he needed to piece together, like trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what image the puzzle pieces were all supposed to make once connected.

“Why am I here?” Keller asked, his words less slurred than before but still not as sharp as they could be.

“What do you think you’re going to get from taking me?” The kidnapper laughed to himself, barely audible to the senator.

“It’s not always about you, Mr. Keller,” the kidnapper said and paced the floor back and forth, causing the bright light from the lantern to force the senator to close his eyes to keep from being blinded every few seconds.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? You kidnapped a nominee for President of the United States. Of course it’s about me,” Jim Keller said in a condescending tone.

“I suppose in a way it is about you. You play a critical role in the plan.”

“What plan?”

“I made the point that I wanted to make. And in the next day or two, I’ll be driving that point home. Sleep well, Mr. Keller.” The kidnapper walked away and reentered the next room.

“What’s with the mask?” Keller shouted but there was no response from the kidnapper. Keller thought about the reasons why the man might be wearing one. He didn’t want to be famous, he figured, otherwise he wouldn’t be hiding.
Was he wearing it in case he had to escape so the senator couldn’t identify him?
Then a chilling thought entered the senator’s mind.
He didn’t recognize his voice, but would he recognize his face? Is that why he was wearing the mask? Did he know this man?

Once David Mitchell found his way out of the industrial park and was sure that he was far enough out of earshot from the rundown and abandoned warehouse that he had followed the kidnapper to, he dropped a gear and twisted the throttle. That helped increase his bike’s RPMs and make it more powerful and quicker at the already high speeds. The bike jerked. It felt like someone had kicked him in the back. He headed north and kept the engine revved up close to the Red Line as he made his way back to his apartment.

It was starting to get late and Mitchell was sure that the sounds of his bike roaring through the backstreets and residential neighborhoods of McKinley Park and Bridgeport would surely wake up any children trying to fall asleep and aggravate their parents. But he didn’t care. He had to get home and publish the story that he knew would send shockwaves throughout America.
The biggest story of his life
.

As he arrived at his Gold Coast apartment building on Clark Street, a twenty minute drive that he had been able to navigate in just ten minutes, David Mitchell parked his bike, jogged inside, and entered the elevator. He punched the button for the third floor and impatiently punched it a few more times before the elevator doors finally closed. When he made it to his floor, Mitchell exited the elevator quickly just as the doors were opening without caring if anyone had been waiting to enter on the other side.

He walked down the ritzy hallway of the seventy-year-old building kept in pristine condition. Once as a reporter for the Tribune, he had visited the Gold Coast area while on assignment to write a story about the ten wealthiest neighborhoods in Chicago. The Gold Coast was at the top of the list with a mean household income at just over $150,000 a year. He had been new to the Chicago area and it was one of the first articles he wrote. After visiting the neighborhood, he had been determined to live there somehow.

When Mitchell was fired from the Tribune and struck out on his own, the news Website that he created took off and started receiving just over a thousand visits a day. To his surprise, it generated enough revenue from ads that he was able to pay the $675 monthly rent for his loft in North Lawndale. Now, he received that many visits in an hour and made from ad revenue in one month working for himself what he used to make in a year working at the “The World’s Greatest Newspaper” and moved to the ritzy neighborhood to show the world and himself that despite being fired from his dream job, he still
made it
.

He opened the door and flipped on the light. It was an open plan apartment with very few internal dividing walls except for the office and bedroom. He had wood floors, recessed lights in the ceilings, and furniture that had been chosen by an interior decorator he had hired when he first moved in. It looked like the kind of apartment that might be owned by a movie star or athlete. In some ways he still acted like a kid. Empty pizza boxes were stacked on the granite countertop in the kitchen and a Sony PlayStation was hooked up to his big screen TV with controllers and empty bags of potato chips sprawled out on his coffee table. Despite success, some things never changed.

Mitchell walked into his office and moved the mouse to wake up his laptop. Three additional monitor screens illuminated and displayed a number of news Websites, the competition he monitored each day. He hit refresh on all of them and waited patiently for each individual page to load to find out what they had reported about the kidnapping.
The Drudge Report
was the first to load and displayed the headline,
Chaos in Chicago
. Next,
HuffPo
loaded and revealed their headline about the story,
Senator Delayed
.

“What?” Mitchell said, and clicked on the links to read the stories. They were written quickly with tons of spelling mistakes and bad grammar, which he knew meant they had been published without going through the hands of an editor. But the content – they didn’t say that the senator had been kidnapped – only that he was
delayed
. He quickly skimmed through a few more stories on other news Websites and they all had the same spin: Keller was delayed because of
traffic
. David Mitchell smiled. He drafted a new post on his blog and titled it
Senator Jim Keller Kidnapped in Chicago – Developing…
and hit
publish
.

The convention floor was electric. After Agent Davis left Debra Stewart and the off duty cops working security for the event, the chairwoman had developed a plan for controlling the chaos that would soon break out.

Stewart led the men upstairs to the executive suite where Jim Keller had been preparing for his speech. She needed a place where she could think and talk about the plan with the hired security team. Stewart didn’t realize that this was where Keller had been kidnapped from until she entered the room. The door to the suite was propped open with a chair from inside the room. When she and the men walked in, Stewart saw the large air return grille leaning against the wall right next to a gaping hole and noticed the droplets of blood on the carpet. That’s when she realized that something bad had happened in the suite.

The sight took her breath away. Debra Stewart was a powerful woman who prided herself on straight talk and aggressiveness. The kind of woman who felt perfectly comfortable in a boardroom and especially if she was the one leading the meeting. Stewart could be found a few times a week on one of the cable news channels debating with pundits and operatives on the other side of the aisle, piped in from her home office that was equipped with cameras, elaborate lighting, and a bookshelf with books she never intended to read. She loved to argue and back opponents into a corner.

But for the first time in what felt like forever, she didn’t know what to say. She crouched down and looked inside the wall and could see another opening and light coming into the pathway. She turned around and looked at the men.

One of them spoke up, standing in for the chairwoman who needed a moment to compose herself.

“I say we call the damn FBI, they need to see this. All we can do on our end is damage control, try our best to keep the place from turning into a melee.” Another man spoke.

“What about Agent Davis, the lady who just spoke with us? Is she not FBI?” Debra Stewart finally spoke.

“Davis is DDC. Senator Keller declined Secret Service protection… said it would put a layer between him and his constituents. It doesn’t matter right now, he’s been taken and we need to figure out what we we’re going to do.”

“We each cover a different area until someone who can actually control these people gets here,” the first man spoke again. He pointed to one of the officers. “You take the north side, Jason covers east, Mark takes south, Daryl handles west. I’ll head to the middle of the floor. And
you
,” he pointed at Debra Stewart, “You get on the damn phone and call the FBI
right now
. This place is about to turn into the biggest cluster you’ve ever seen – the nominee for president is kidnapped – do you get that?
Call them
.”

Stewart blinked and was visibly startled by the officer’s aggressiveness. In the boardroom or on TV, she would have put the man in his place. This was her convention, after all. She had coordinated everything. She planned the speakers. She hired the security firm and the men she was talking to now. They worked for
her
, actually. But, she had also agreed to Keller’s request to defer Secret Service protection until after tonight and let him rely on a handful of DDC agents, one of which he thought the world of, named Jordan.

Out on the floor, delegates and people from around the country who had previously been overjoyed at the nearing climax of the four-day event drawing to a close and cheer their nominee were now wearing angry, confused looks on their faces. There were loud discussions over the blaring music, some of which turned into shouts in frustration of what was happening. It was close to nine o’clock. As each minute passed the crowd became more impatient and tempers began to flare.
You don’t get stuck in Chicago traffic for this long on a Thursday night. Wouldn’t Jim Keller have a police escort? Where the hell was the senator?

Stewart realized that she could have prevented all of this. “I’ll call. Now go,” she told the men.

Just when they got to their posts, word spread that one news Website was not saying the senator was stuck in traffic. “He’s been kidnapped!” the officers heard from every corner and braced themselves.

When Jami and I started to walk back into the building the same way we left, we saw that there was a group of people standing over the bodies of agents Rob McGovern and Matt Flynn. One man held a cell phone with one hand and held the other to his forehead. Another man and woman stood nearby watching.

“Follow me,” I said, and walked west along the building to avoid the scene.

“Blake? What are you doing?” We kept walking the length of the building and I looked at the many exit doors along the way. They were like the exits at a movie theater, no handles from the outside. As we walked, someone exited from one of the many doors up ahead, too far away from where Jami and I were. Then one of the doors close to us opened and a man in a suit exited and ran out to the parking lot. I held the door and Jami and I entered.

“I noticed that this building and the one across the street both have cameras all over them. We need to find the security office and review the footage and see what happened. I think it’s on the fourth floor.” We were almost to the third floor when more people started flooding out of the convention center and leaving. We could hear shouting over the music. Jami and I stopped and looked at each other.

“They know, Blake.”

We kept moving and when we arrived at the fourth floor, we both jogged down the labyrinth of hallways. I kept one hand on my Glock, not knowing what to expect and still trying to make sense of the whole thing. I found the security office I had passed earlier in the evening and tried to open the door. It was locked. Jami and I could see a man in his early twenties wearing a blue blazer through the window. He walked toward us and stopped at the door. I flashed my badge and he let us in.

“FBI? That didn’t take long. Glad you’re here.” I looked at Jami and she nodded at me.

“My name is Blake Jordan. This is Agent Jami Davis.” I looked around the room before continuing. There was a bank of sixteen video monitors above his desk, two rows of eight stacked on top of each other. The top row streamed real-time video of inside the arena and the monitors on the bottom row showed the outside. The video on each screen toggled every few seconds to another camera to give security the ability to see coverage of the entire inside and outside areas of the building from the desk in this room.

“We need to know what you saw,” I said.

“There’s two men dead at the south exit. I didn’t see it happen. I was watching the stage where Billings was speaking and monitoring the crowd.”

“Show us the footage, I want to see what happened and who did this,” I said. The young man hesitated.

“I can’t do that. I just monitor, I don’t know how to work the controls.”

“Figure it out,” I demanded. The man walked over to a monitor that I hadn’t noticed before. He punched a few buttons on the control board and video from one of the outside cameras appeared on the screen. He tried something else and video from the half empty convention floor displayed. A few more adjustments and the guard isolated the feed from the camera where McGovern and Flynn were killed. It showed the men on the floor, the three onlookers, as well as paramedics and two police officers who I assumed were called by the man on the cell phone when he discovered the bodies.

“I need you to rewind it,” I said while Jami and I stood behind the security officer. His shaking hands flipped switches and punched a few more buttons. The video stood still then started to rewind. Thirty seconds later and we saw the two agents talking with each other. “Play it from there,” I said to the man.

We watched Rob McGovern and Matt Flynn talking to each other and then stopped when a janitor entered the room. He walked in backwards, pulling a large crate inside with him. Once he got through the door, he turned around and spoke to the agents who looked at each other like they were confused by what they were seeing. Then the janitor pulled out a firearm and gunned them down. “Stop the tape,” I said.

Jami and I looked at the man on the still frame of the video footage. The image was too grainy for us to see the face clearly. A few seconds later, Jami put her hand on my back and pointed to one of the monitors.

“Blake, they’re here.”