The Warrior Code (20 page)

‘There. Look closely.’

The image on the screen was of the two women and the door of the booth. The door was shut, cutting off sight of its occupants.

Zeb pointed a finger at the bottom of the image, the bottom of the booth’s door, and then they saw it.

Four shadows. But if they looked carefully, they resolved into two pairs of shoes.

Broker looked up sharply.

‘Their stuff? Did they take it with them to Kelly’s?’

‘Nope. This was one time they didn’t. Meghan said she had enough photographs of Kelly’s home,’ Zeb replied distractedly.

His eyes widened as Broker’s question sank into him.

They ran out of the café.

Chapter 22

Beth accompanied George, the hotel’s bellboy, out of the store and followed him to the park in Town Square. George was working part time at their hotel to fund his college tuition, and the sisters made it a point to tip him generously whenever he helped them.

There were a few vehicles, one of them a black van, idling near the pavement leading to the park.

He pointed to a large black one.

‘She said she would be behind those wheels.’

She smiled at him, crossed the road, and hurried across.

Meg wasn’t there.

There was no bench.

There were people lying in the grass in the park. She removed her shades and squinted. No Meg.

Dimly she heard sliding doors open, and the next moment felt a hand cup across her mouth and felt herself lifted.

Realization flooded her too late.
Not again
, she screamed at herself.

She kicked and lashed out, but she was carried so professionally and quickly, her struggles had no effect. In a couple of seconds she was bundled inside, tied and taped.

Inside, she met Meghan’s eyes. Her sister was spitting mad and was making furious noises behind her tape.

In spite of her circumstances, Beth smiled.

If there were gas fumes in the air, Meg’s eyes would’ve provided the spark.

‘Diversion,’ Zeb shouted as they dashed inside the hotel, heedless of the looks and curses they got as they roughly pushed past other people.

Zeb tossed his SUV’s keys to Broker, who veered off to the hotel basement.

Roger thumbed the elevator impatiently, and when it stayed stubbornly at another floor, they looked at each other and dashed to the stairs.

Zeb dug out his sat phone.

‘Kelly, are you alone?’

When he got an affirmative squawk, he continued.

‘Don’t say anything. Don’t ask anything. I need someone with a car who you can trust implicitly. Who will do what you tell him without fail.’

Kelly clenched his fist tight. He sensed from Zeb’s tone things had gone nuclear. He also knew now was not the time to ask questions.

‘My deputy, Mark Feinberg. I trust him with my life. Have done so on a couple of occasions, in fact. Tell me what, where and when, and it will be done.’

Zeb told him.

They reached the seventh floor where the sisters were staying.

The central corridor was empty.

Roger positioned himself on the left of the door.

Zeb ducked beneath the peephole and moved to the right.

He reached out with his left hand, inserted a spare card key, flipped the door handle down, and slammed the door open.

Nothing.

He dived low into the room, twisted to face the expanse of the room, gun trained and ready.

Nothing. No one. Silence and emptiness mocked him.

‘Clear,’ he called out.

Roger came in and watched as Zeb stormed around the room, grabbed a backpack, emptied it, searched for and found Meghan’s laptop, thrust it inside the backpack, and threw the power cord after it. Roger tossed him the camera, and it joined the laptop.

Less than five minutes and they were out of the room, and in ten minutes they had joined Broker.

‘Nothing.’ Broker looked up from behind the wheel. Zeb was motionless by his side; his thousand-yard stare revealed nothing.

‘The trackers in their jackets and shoes are inactive. Their phones are inactive.’

Zeb thumbed his phone.

‘Kelly?’

He listened silently.

‘Yeah. Nope, can’t involve you. I trust you, no one else.’

He listened at the silence from Kelly’s end as he digested the implications.

‘Yeah, thanks.’ He hung up and met Roger’s and Broker’s looks.

‘Liz dropped them off an hour back. Neither of them heard from the Petersens since then.’

A police cruiser pulled up next to them, and a uniform hopped out and tapped on Broker’s window.

‘Zeb?’

Broker thumbed at Zeb by his side.

Mark met Zeb’s eyes.

‘Kelly sent me. I’m Mark. He said if I didn’t do what you said, he’d shoot me. That’s mighty strong motivation for me.’ He grinned, and his even white teeth lightened his tanned, clean-shaven face.

Broker took Zeb’s sat phone, fiddled with it for a moment, and handed it to Mark.

‘Take this with you, and just keep driving to Salt Lake City till Kelly asks you to return. Just drive. Now!’

Mark’s face fell. ‘Is that all? The way Kelly said it, I thought–’

Broker’s face was grim. ‘Son, your driving with just a phone with you for company might just mean some folks come back alive.’

Mark saluted him, turned around without a word, fired his cruiser, and roared away with his lights flashing.

‘You forwarded calls?’ Roger asked from the rear.

Broker held his phone up. ‘All calls to Zeb’s phone are diverted to mine.’

He switched places with Roger, pointed in the general direction of south, and Roger wheeled out. Tracing the movements of the sisters was unnecessary.

They had a rough idea where they would be held.

Silence filled the SUV, broken only by the clacking of Broker on Meghan’s keyboard and the soft hum of rubber on tarmac.

Roger glanced at the volcano beside him. ‘We’ll get them back.’

They left the city behind, and then Roger couldn’t hold it in any longer.

‘I’m just here for the driving and the shooting,’ he drawled. ‘But dang it, if either of you smartasses told me where we were heading, that would be a great help. Thatway is a pretty large country, and after thatway lies Mexico!’

Zeb looked at him. He’d gotten his emotions under control.

Roger read philosophy in his spare time, Chloe was a science fanatic, and Bear and Bwana were members of Mensa. All the members in his team were not just the most elite operatives; they possessed a very high degree of intelligence and reasoning.

Roger’s slow-witted Texan act was just that.

If he wanted to know, it meant he had worked it out for himself and was seeking confirmation.

‘He’s got a ranch somewhere that way. We know that much. We figure he’s grabbed the twins and taken them to the place he knows best. Broker is working on finding out where exactly it is.’

Silence, dusk and rubber ate the miles.

‘And when did you figure it out?’

‘I didn’t.’ To strangers, Zeb’s voice would’ve sounded conversational. Only Broker and Roger could detect the bitterness in it. ‘Not until that café guy started talking.

‘I then remembered that something had to have happened in the café for the whole kidnap to have worked.

‘All along, I was working on the premise that Zubia saw them in the hotel and decided to lift them for his trafficking. But the sisters didn’t spend any time in the hotel the first day. They checked in and left immediately to visit Town Square, and in the evening they went to Kelly’s house. Zubia must have spotted them the next day.’

Roger got it. ‘But the timeline didn’t work for the next day. It was too short a window to organize a grab.’

Zeb nodded. ‘The café was the only place they spent significant time; time for them to have seen or overheard something, or for someone to have seen or overheard
them.’

‘Why didn’t the cops go through that recording?’

Zeb shrugged. ‘They had enough eye witnesses telling them that nothing had happened anywhere. No reason for them to look at security cameras.’

Zeb glanced at Broker’s phone, which gleamed in an armrest pocket between Roger and him. He reached out to pick it up.

His arm stilled when Broker shouted from behind him, ‘I’ve got it.’ He gave them the coordinates to the ranch.

Roger punched them in the navigation system. Two more hours.

Broker whistled.

‘It’s not a dude ranch. It’s the real thing, all three hundred thousand acres of it. They’re into cattle ranching, stud horses, and supply beef locally.’

He went quiet. ‘Jeez, this place will be a nightmare to get into. A central lodge, several cabins scattered nearby, a swimming pool, a horse corral, all of it surrounded by open space, and get this – its own private runway. There’s a Piper Archer DX aircraft registered to the ranch. The ranch has thirty people at any time, usually. The central lodge itself has several rooms.’

Zeb timed it in his mind. Two hours to reach the ranch. Another hour to make it secure against an attack. Then the call from the ranch to them.

Broker saw the tension in him and read his mind.

‘I’m on it.’ They heard his fingers flying over the laptop.

Whatever the abductor was seeking, it had to be in Meghan’s camera or laptop.

Nothing else made sense.

If the girls had seen or heard something that had led to their grab – that could be easily discredited.

It had to be harder evidence, like that in a memory disc on one of the two devices. Or maybe both.

Zeb looked out at the tarmac as nervous energy and rage on wheels ran over it, the road below one continuous sheet of black.

The sisters were probably discussing something they had saved, something that was innocuous to them, which was overheard by the men in the booth. That’s the trigger. The man couldn’t get the devices stolen because it was always with Meghan or in a very public place, like the hotel.

He cleared his mind,
Broker would find it
, and focused on the ranch.

He laid it out in his mind, played around with the location, and thought about the likely opposition strength. He considered the terrain, considered the innocents on the ranch – cooks, cleaners, help – and squelched the helplessness that reared its head.

The odds were stacked against him.

But they always were, in any mission.

He looked at elements of surprise or shock to lower resistance. No ideas came to him.

He thought of plain audaciousness. Nope.

He thought about entries he had made in previous missions. He shook his head. Terrains were different; neighborhoods were different.

He cast his mind wider, zoomed out the ranch layout in his mind.

There. Something over there.

‘Pull over,’ Broker said from the back.

There was something in his voice. Something Roger and Zeb didn’t question. Something they had never heard before.

Roger eased the SUV to a stop, and they swung around.

Broker’s face was ashen. That was the first clue that it was bad.

He turned Meghan’s laptop around silently, brought up a video player, selected a file, and clicked on play.

All of them were battle-hardened men who had witnessed others do unspeakable things in combat. All of them lived lives of violence.

Death accompanied them.

What they saw chilled even them.

None of them spoke for a while when the video finished.

Roger murmured, ‘This is worse than we thought.’

Zeb’s eyes focused again as if something dormant had stirred. They saw a light in his brown eyes; they had seen that light only a few times before.

It was the last light his opponents saw.

Chapter 23

Once the van was out of the city, a door separating the driver’s cabin opened.

Beth’s hijacker came in dressed in a business suit and removed a pair of blindfolds from his pocket.

Meghan looked at Beth.

They launched themselves silently at the man.

Their shoulders rammed into him, and he went down with a grunt. Meghan twisted her body around and punched him in the abdomen with her elbow.

Her elbow jarred. His abdomen was lined with hard muscle.

Beth kneed him in the groin and met a hard thigh. She bit him, and her teeth hurt.

The man roared and plucked them away one by one like they were feather pillows and threw them back on the bench.

Beth jumped at him again and slumped when his palm cracked across her face.

Meghan’s face turned furiously red as she kicked at him, and then she lost consciousness as he punched her.

When they came to, they were blindfolded.

Beth knew they were heading south and were on a highway; the smoothness of the ride and the distant hum of tires told her that. She pushed across the bench toward Meghan for warmth and comfort as she realized the men had taken away their jackets, their shoes and their phones.

There was no way for Zeb and Broker to track them.

After what felt like an hour more of driving, the van turned, and the jostling told her it was now running on an unpaved track. Another hour of twists and turns and the uneven ride smoothened out and the van came to a halt.

She heard muffled voices from within the cab, their door slid open, and they were hauled out.

She tried to look around, but the cloth across her eyes cut off light and sight. She knew it was nearing dark, and from the way the breeze moved and smelled, they were somewhere remote.

Their shoes scraped on gravel as they were shoved ahead, rough hands guided them over steps, and they went inside.

The floor below her feet felt soft, it was carpeted. The room they were in was large; there was a feeling of space. It smelled of wood.

The entrance door closed behind them. From the way it slammed shut, it sounded like a large door.

Hands went behind her head, and the blindfold came off.

She blinked a few times, wiped her eyes against the sleeve of her T-shirt, and looked around for Meg.