Hearts Under Siege (24 page)

“We’ve got to ditch this car.” Dix pulled into the first big parking lot they found, in front of a small grocery store with enough cars in the lot to hide the sedan. “In case it’s being tracked.”

“And the cell phones,” Brady added, dumping his onto the seat. “They have the GPS data for the company phones.”

“What good will that do?” She pried the back off of hers and popped out the battery. “We have to take Dix’s with us. It’s our only contact with Shae’s captors. And if we have his—”

“The rest don’t matter.” Brady powered down Dix’s phone and took out the battery, looking grim.

“What about our clothes?” Molly patted herself randomly. “They could have hidden trackers on any of us.”

Dix shook his head and turned the car off, dropping the keys under the seat. “This is real life, not spy TV. Trackers small enough to hide are still rare and expensive. Just check all your pockets and stuff.”

They did, then left the locked car to be retrieved later and started walking. They only had about a mile to go and agreed stealing a car or calling a cab would be counterproductive.

“Can you make it?” She tried to tuck herself under Brady’s good arm, but he shook her off and took her hand again instead. Dix noticed, quirked a sad smile at her, and moved to walk in front of them in the direction she’d indicated.

“I’m fine,” Brady insisted. “How did you know about that place, and the hay and everything?”

“I worked for the census one summer, and we had to go explore lots of remote spots like that. I’d talked to the owner for a few hours and took a chance that his ‘biggest haystack in the county’ was still there

Brady whistled. “Big chance. That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t very old. Something like that, people don’t let go of easily.” She shivered when Brady’s hand tightened around hers, as if to punctuate her last few words. “I’m just glad it popped into my head.”

“They know we’re here,” Dix pointed out. “And that we’re not heading to the rendezvous point. What’s that going to do to the kid?”

“Hopefully nothing,” Brady said. “They gave us until morning. We have time to meet that deadline.”

“Unless they figure out what we’re doing.” Anxiety danced over Molly’s nerves. “If they think we’re copying the information, or taking it to someone, they might—” She stopped, because what the hell else could they do at this point?

They crossed a road into a residential area. It was late now, and quiet, and the stillness of the streets had them all silent as they got closer to Brady’s parents’ house. He wished he’d been able to call his father, alert him that they were on their way and being tailed. They could have met somewhere else instead of in front of his mother and Jessica, perhaps still leading the bad guys to his innocent family. He wished, as they turned down his parents’ street, that it felt more like nearing safety and less like dooming everyone.

“Hold up,” he murmured, reaching out to stop Dix before they reached the driveway. “This doesn’t feel right.”

Dix and Molly waited while he did a 360, checking the neighborhood for any tiny thing out of place. A fluttering curtain or glint of light, shadows where there shouldn’t be, vehicles that didn’t match the homes they were parked in front of. But nothing jumped out at him. Nothing alerted him to the presence of any danger. So all he could do was lead them up the walk.

Assuming everyone was asleep, he headed for the kitchen door. But as he lifted his foot to the bottom step, his father loomed out of the shadows of the back porch.

He gave a silent head jerk toward the detached garage behind the house and started down the steps. Brady shrugged at the other two and they followed. How long had his father been outside, waiting for them? He pressed his arm against the package inside his shirt and hoped whatever was about to happen next would put an end to the lies and the pain.

His father eased open the barn-style door, let them all go in, and closed it behind them, sliding a two-by-eight board into an iron frame to secure the door. Brady relaxed and reached into his shirt as his father lit an oil lamp on a heavy wooden table.

“Everyone okay?” Rick asked. Experienced eyes assessed each of them in turn—Brady, then Molly, then Dix.

“No,” Molly said in contrast to the guys’ nods. “Brady was shot last night and was barely out of surgery when we had to flee the hospital. Dix’s driving—and my navigation,” she added before Dix could get too huffy, “aggravated the wound.”

“Molly took a knife slice to the chest,” Brady countered, not caring if it made him sound ten years old. She hadn’t let him look at it when they left the car, and he’d been worried enough about being out in the open to let it go until they were safe. “It hasn’t been treated yet,” he added as his father came to him instead of Molly.

“Surgery, huh?”

Brady rolled his eyes when his father motioned for him to remove his shirt but obeyed, trying very hard not to wince as his movements pulled at the stitched-together flesh. His father assessed the amount of blood staining the bandage. “Looks okay, considering. We’ll need to get you antibiotics. That the information?” He reached for the packet sticking out of Brady’s waistband.

At that exact moment, two bodies burst feet-first through the wooden slats over windows on the back and side of the building. Brady tried to do too many things at once—reaching for a gun he didn’t have, crouching to present a smaller target, pulling Molly down and trying to get her behind cover, and protecting the packet.

The men must have swung down from the roof. Black ropes dangled through the shattered wood. One of the black-clad figures leapt on Brady’s father, while the other dove for the packet that had fallen to the floor. Dix lunged, too, knocking Guy One off the envelope, but his momentum took him out of reach of it. Brady would have gone after it, but his father had lost the upper hand.

“Help Rick.” Molly scrambled for the packet, too close to where Dix grappled with Guy Two.

Brady hesitated for a crucial second before rushing to his father’s side. He had no upper body leverage or strength, so he balanced on his left leg and slammed the bottom of his right boot at Guy One’s head. Guy One fell sideways, stunned enough for Rick to get out from under him and finish him off with a knee to the chin.

Brady spun to find Molly. She huddled—and looked furious about it—behind the massive table, several feet now from where Dix still exchanged punches with Guy Two. Brady stepped to go help him, but his father caught his arm and shook his head. Two hits later, Dix stood panting over Guy One.

“Nicely done,” Rick said in an authoritative voice. “Now, let’s see who we have here.” He bent and pulled the knit hood off the guy at his feet. “I don’t know you.” He looked to Brady and Dix, and they both shook their heads. Rick bent to check pockets, found a wallet, and tossed it to Brady.

He flipped it open and found a DC driver’s license. It looked legit. Not a field agent, then, or one not trained very well. His eyebrows went up when he read the name. “Dad. It’s John Ellison.”

“Howard Ellison’s son.” Rick studied the groaning man. “Not part of SIEGE, but obviously working for his father. Secure him.” He pulled a handful of zip ties from the thigh pocket of his cargo pants and tossed them onto the table before striding over to Guy Two, whom Dix had already secured and kept on his knees with a hand on his shoulder.

Brady took a moment to absorb the absurdity. He’d always seen his father as a standard middle management type, and here he was engaged in hand-to-hand combat and giving orders. By the time Brady moved toward the zip ties, Molly had already picked them up.

“I got him.” She handed the information packet to Brady. “You guard this.”

He bristled at the implication that he couldn’t handle Ellison Junior, but then pain burst through his shoulder, the abuse it had taken making itself known. “All right. But be careful.” He watched closely as Molly rolled Junior to his stomach, ready to intervene if the guy so much as flinched. But though he was fully conscious now, he made no effort to get away. With quick, sure movements, Molly ringed his wrists with the ties and hauled him to his knees. She didn’t even blink at an effort that would have been difficult, if not impossible, if the cut on her chest had been deep.

He was so busy watching her that he didn’t notice another presence in the room until he heard the distinctive click of a revolver being cocked. Right by his ear.

“I’ll take those, thank you very much.” The woman’s soft voice was an even bigger shock than the weapon. A long, slender hand tipped with crimson nails reached around him and plucked the envelope from his hand. After a few beats, everyone else in the room froze.

“Ramona?” Molly asked incredulously. “Aldus, right? But…you’re a facilitator.”

“What? No, she’s not.” Dix looked from Molly to the woman behind Brady, puzzled.

“Yes, she is,” Molly insisted. “She’s the woman I met with about Christopher. She’s, like, public relations.” But she sounded less certain by the time she finished speaking. Brady could follow her thoughts. The woman could be a simple facilitator working for Ellison or his partner…but she seemed much too confident and in charge.

Brady’s father was the only one who didn’t look confused. In fact, he looked…amused?

“Dad.” Brady couldn’t believe it. This woman had had Christopher killed! Twice! “What’s going on?”

Rick shrugged. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Ramona, one of SIEGE’s top executives, and Howard are the bad guys. They think that information”—he motioned to the packet Ramona held—”is all they need to destroy, to eliminate the evidence against them.”

“Evidence of what?” Ramona scoffed. “There can’t be anything in here too incriminating. Certainly not my name.”

“But it is!” Molly rolled her lips inward after her outburst, clearly regretting revealing her knowledge. But then she shrugged. “I mean, if you’re exposing yourself, threatening us at gunpoint, you must believe it is. But I don’t know your endgame. You gonna kill us all? That would just set more people on your trail.”

Brady smiled at her, pride and love filling him up until he almost forgot about the muzzle behind his ear. Molly was smart and tough and understood him better than anyone, but more than all that, she was the strongest person he’d ever met. Man or woman, agent or not.

How the hell could he have been stupid enough not to see it before now? How could he ever have wanted Jessica, and all that weakness and self-centeredness?

“I don’t need to kill anyone,” Ramona said. “Without evidence, no one can prove anything. They can’t—”

“Get you tried for espionage against the government?” Rick asked conversationally. “Are you sure the only evidence is in that envelope?”

The sullen silence behind him told Brady that no, she wasn’t sure. She was probably trying to decide whether or not to call their bluff.

Except…
Fuck
. She didn’t need to call it. She had everything now. The information and Shae. He was surprised she hadn’t used her leverage already.

He fumed, unable to come up with a plan. Normally her position, with the gun up against his skull, wasn’t a strong one. It was too easy for him to spin and disarm her. Easy when he wasn’t hobbled by a pre-existing bullet wound.

“SIEGE isn’t a government entity,” she said. “All we do is move information. We don’t act on it.”

Rick scoffed. “That defense won’t even get you in the door. And that information isn’t all we have on you. Sorry, but you’re toast.”

“Then I guess I should kill you, after all.”

The gun shifted against Brady’s skull. He tried hard not to flinch away from it and cause a reflexive shot. His eyes narrowed at the sudden glint in his father’s eye. But he didn’t move.

In his peripheral vision, he saw Molly shift onto her heels, out of the ready stance she’d taken as soon as Ramona put the gun on him. What the hell was going on?

The silence in the building crackled with tension. Something was about to break, and Brady didn’t want it to be him.

“Treason’s the least of her worries,” he said. “She tried to kill Christopher.
Twice
. They’ll start with murder one.”

The glint in his father’s eye deepened, a dark, satisfied amusement. “You know, Ramona, your field agent skills still suck ass.”

“My field—” The woman’s indignant retort ended abruptly with a dull thump. The gun fell away from Brady’s head and he spun, bracing himself to take Ramona out with one punch. That was all he’d get, the way he felt right now. But she was already on the ground, cold-cocked by baseball bat, her revolver held—in his mother’s free hand.

Chapter Seventeen

Donna Fitzpatrick stepped around the heap that was Ramona Aldus, uncocked the revolver, slipped on the safety, and tucked it into her waistband without a hint of hesitation. Then she set her bat on the table and dried her hands on a dish towel. His disconsolate, wet mess of a mother was gone, replaced by a steady rock displaying as steely an edge as her husband.

“You’re losing your touch,” she chided Rick as she walked across the barn. “Ten years ago she’d have never gotten the jump on you.”

“I had it fully under control,” Brady’s father said as if this was banter they were used to exchanging. But it fell flat under the circumstances, and Brady couldn’t wrap his head around one important point.

“Mom?” His voice came out thin. “You’re— You can’t be—”

“SIEGE? Why not?” She checked the ties around the wrists of the man Dix stood over. “I’m guessing this is Howard.” She pulled off the hood, leaving the man’s white hair fluffed on top of his head. Ellison scowled and stared straight ahead.

Brady had no answer for why not. Hell, everyone else was working for SIEGE. But… “You were always home. You never went on missions.”

“Not after you kids were born, no.” She leaned against the table and folded her arms. “We can talk about this later, sweetie. The police are on their way. Then it looks like you all need some patching up.”

A siren wailed. Brady shook off his incredulity. This wasn’t over. He strode to Ellison, since Ramona was out cold, and fisted his hand in the guy’s shirt. “Where is she?”

Ellison’s gaze never wavered, but his mouth twisted with smugness. Rage had Brady hauling back, oblivious to the surging pain in his shoulder, but his father intervened.

“Hey! Hold on. Where’s who?” Rick looked grim. “Jessica—”

“No.” Brady took a step back. His chest heaved, frustration tearing at him. He wanted to hurt Ellison, make him give up Shae’s location. “Not Jessica. Shae. Chris’s daughter.” The words came out hard and intense, but only when he heard them did Brady realize what he was doing. He shifted to look at his father, whose face had drained of all color.

“Chris’s…what?”

“What did you say?” His mother came around from behind Brady and stared at him.

Crap
. He shoved his right hand through his hair. This was the opposite of how he had wanted this to come out. There wasn’t time to explain, and possibly even less time to get to his niece. Dawn was moments away. But words twisted and jumbled in his brain, pounded down by the throbbing pain in his shoulder.

Then Molly stepped forward and put her hand on his arm. A balm, even if it barely took the edge off.

“At the funeral,” she explained quickly to his parents, “we found a young girl trying to pay her respects. She was the spitting image of Christopher. Ramona was there, and she must have seen the resemblance, too. She abducted her and sent Dix a threatening video. They implied they’d trade her for the information, but since all the players seem to be here—”

Behind them, Ramona laughed. Brady and the others turned to watch her roll gracelessly onto her back and sit up. Her laughter didn’t match the mingled fury and fear in her eyes.

“Let me go,” she said, “and I’ll tell you where the girl is. Keep me, and she dies within the hour.”

“How?” Brady demanded, advancing on her. “Where is she?”

Ramona gave him a disdainful look. “I
said
, let me go.”

“Not gonna happen.”

Brady’s parents hadn’t said anything yet, out of shock, he figured, but as the police approached the garage and called out, his father took charge again and opened up the main door to let them in. Uniforms and plainclothes swarmed the building, weapons ready, and it took a few minutes—too many minutes—to sort out who was whom. Every beat of Brady’s heart measured the time passing. Maybe the time Shae had left. Aldus had given them just an hour.

Rick handed over the materials to the detective in charge, who admitted it was outside his jurisdiction and would have to go to the feds. But it was in the right hands, so Chris should be safe, even if Ellison and Aldus had other people working for them, still out there.

Brady didn’t bother stopping the officers leading Aldus away. He wouldn’t get anything from Aldus now, not when she didn’t think she had anything left to lose. But they had no other leads, and no
time
.

When Brady saw Molly slip back into the garage, he skirted a cluster of cops to get to her. “Where did you go?”

She pulled him further away, toward a shadowy corner. “I checked the GPS on Ramona’s car. I was hoping she didn’t know how to get to the house and keyed in the address from wherever she’s holding Shae.”

Hope flared. “And?”

“I don’t know if that’s where she was, but she did use it. I got an address.” She waved a piece of paper. “Can we sneak out of here?”

Brady glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t want to sneak away without backup, with both of them injured. But his parents and Dix were all engaged with the cops right now, and the heartbeats measuring seconds had become thuds. Nearly half an hour had passed already since Aldus had given Shae an hour. Molly was right. “Okay. Let’s go. I’ll call my father from the road, and he can send backup just in case.”

They hurried out to the street.

“What are we going to drive?” Molly asked, surveying the crowded neighborhood. Her car was still at the airport, the rental getting ticketed in DC. Dix’s, of course, they’d ditched. Ramona’s was the easiest to get to, but they had no key.

“I’ll get my keys. Car’s down the block. I don’t think it’s locked.” Brady hurried inside the house, trying to look purposeful but not in such a hurry that he drew attention from the cops dotting the yard. When he came back out the front door, Ramona was being led to a squad car by one of the detectives. She sneered at him, defiant even as she was lowered into the vehicle.

He ignored the urge to go plow his fist in her face and instead walked to his car, where Molly was already in the driver’s seat plugging the address into his GPS.

“It’s only a few miles,” she told him when he got in the car. “We’ll make it.”

Assuming they were going to the right place. He handed her the keys and braced himself for whatever they were about to find.

…

The address turned out to be in a residential neighborhood, a small Cape Cod–style house. Molly was glad it wasn’t a warehouse or something else huge, with too much area to search. But as innocent as the house looked, she had a feeling this wasn’t going to be easy.

“What if it’s wired?” she asked as they got out of the car.

“I’m sure they’ve got something set up.” Brady scanned the sidewalk but saw no evidence of a trap. “They wouldn’t have risked harming a stray pet or random local. If they did anything, it will be to the house.”

They made their way carefully to the top of the front stoop. “Is the front door too obvious?” Molly asked. “We should check out all the entrances, right? Look in windows?” She could see from where she stood that the front windows were covered with solid curtains.

“No time.” Brady’s hand went to his hip, as if reaching for a weapon. “We’re down to ten minutes.”

“We can’t just open the door.”

He frowned, examining the doorjamb and latch. “She can’t have booby-trapped everything. She had to be able to get back in.”

“So there’s probably a timer?” Molly guessed. Man, she wished she’d had more field training.

“It could be anything. We probably don’t have to worry about explosives. That would call attention. She’d want to handle everything quietly.” He slowly pushed down on the latch and nudged the door. It moved half an inch.

“Not locked,” he said. He moved it a tiny bit more and called through the crack. “Shae? Are you in there? We’re here to help you.”

Sobs broke the waiting silence. “Who are you?” The voice was young, female. Molly let out the breath she’d been holding. The girl was still alive.

“I’m Brady Fitzpatrick. I’m your—I’m Chris’s brother—we met at the funeral.”

The sobs grew louder, harsher. Broken words came through, but Molly couldn’t understand them.

“Sweetie, we need to know what’s going to happen when we open this door,” she said.

“Nothing.” Shae gasped back her tears. “That’s not the problem.”

“You’re sure?” Brady said. “The door’s not rigged to do anything?”

“No. It’s just me.”

Molly’s blood ran cold. Brady’s face hardened with fury. His head moved slightly in a three-count, and then he burst through the door, rolling right as he did. Molly lost sight of him and squeezed her eyes shut, her shoulders hunching, but nothing happened.

“It’s clear,” Brady called to her, but he didn’t sound relaxed.

She slowly crossed the threshold. Shae sat in a comfortable-looking upholstered chair in the center of the room. Molly frowned at the oddity. The girl wasn’t even tied to the chair. But she sat extremely still, her eyes locked on something above her.

“Don’t move,” Brady ordered. Like either of them was going to.

Molly followed Shae’s sight line and bit back a curse. Three wicked-looking knives hung above the front door, tied to fishing line looped through eye hooks in the wall and ceiling and connected somehow to Shae. It was clear that if the girl moved too much, it would release the knives, which would come swinging down at her. Molly thought a skilled adult could guess at their trajectories and duck or dive wide, but no way an inexperienced teenager could figure it out or move fast enough. Or have the courage to try.

“Can we disconnect them?” Molly asked.

Brady moved closer and squinted, trying to see the nearly invisible fishing line holding them in place. He shook his head. “They’re barely held up here. If we touch the line, they’ll release.”

“How are they connected to you, honey?” Molly asked Shae. The girl had to fight herself to take her eyes off the knives and look at Molly, and only lasted a second before her eyes whipped back to the knives.

“I don’t know. They gave me a shot and I went to sleep, and when I woke up I was here, and they told me if I moved…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Did they do anything to the rest of the house?” Molly tried to keep Shae talking, calm her a little, and distract her from Brady, who was now prowling around, trying to follow the lines. “Were there areas they avoided, or maybe they used extra caution in some places?”

“I don’t think so,” Shae said. “They moved around normally, like there was nothing to worry about.”

“What else did they tell you?”

“That if they weren’t back in an hour, I’d—” She choked, more sobs bursting from her.

“Is there a timer?” Molly asked Brady. She didn’t understand the whole hour thing.

“I’m looking.”

“What did the people look like? Did they use any names?” Molly kept asking questions, but her mind raced. Why would they rig the knives to drop at a certain time? It was gruesome and cruel, and seemed overly melodramatic compared to everything else they’d done. Even with the desperation factor…

“It was two people,” Shae said. “A woman and a man. The man was younger, and called the woman Mona, I think. She called him Junior.”

“There’s no timer.” Brady stood from where he’d been examining the base of the chair. “The time thing seems totally arbitrary. But we’re not getting her off that chair without those knives dropping.” He rested his hand on Shae’s shoulder when she cried harder. “It’s okay. I have a plan.”

He talked them through the plan and made them both recite it back to him. He was outwardly calm and direct, but Molly could see the anxiety underneath.

God, she loved him so much.

“Okay, ready?”

She took a deep breath. Brady stood next to her with an end table. She eased around behind Shae’s chair, being careful not to touch any of the lines coming down to it. She crouched and dug her fingers behind the upper cushion, getting as much of a grip as she could on the back of the chair. “Ready.”

“Okay.” There was a scrape against the floor as Brady picked up the table, grunting with the effort of using his damaged arm. He counted to three, then yelled “Now!”

Molly yanked on the chair, pushing her feet hard at its base to make sure it tipped backward instead of sliding. Shae screamed. There was a faint
twang
, more felt than heard. The chair fell back on Molly and she rolled, shoving hard to flip it over onto the girl. Her brain belatedly registered two
thunk
s and a clatter. Breathing hard, she pushed herself up.

Brady was crouched behind the upturned table. How did he fit his whole big body behind there? The points of two of the knives were visible from the underside of the table. Molly scanned until she spotted the third, on the floor next to the upholstered chair. She scrambled to lift the chair off Shae. Brady helped, his good arm as strong as both of hers.

Shae lay curled tight into herself, not crying, not moving. There was no sign of blood.

“Honey.” Molly crouched and touched the girl’s shoulder. “We’ve got you. Everything’s okay now.”

Shae exploded up into her arms, hugging the breath out of her, whispering, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Molly hugged her back and stroked her hair. Her eyes met Brady’s. His mouth was tight around the edges, meaning his shoulder hurt again, but his gaze was soft and satisfied. Molly had to suppress a shiver at the message he sent her:
It’s over, and now we can focus on us
.

Suddenly, she felt like the danger was just beginning.

…

Brady drove back to his parents’ with Molly holding Shae in the back seat. She’d asked the girl about calling her mother, but she’d refused to give them any information, even when Molly reminded her the woman had to be frantic with worry. She and Brady silently agreed to wait until they got back to the house and let the police take care of it.

Two detectives were still there when they got home. Brady wanted nothing more than to find a pain pill and a horizontal surface, but by the looks on the guys’ faces, that wasn’t going to happen. They separated him and Molly as soon as they walked in the door. Brady’s mother took over Shae, leading her to the kitchen for food and comfort and, Brady was sure, gentle interrogation.