The Senator: A Blake Jordan Thriller (14 page)

Jami and I sat in the backseat of the SUV for a long time waiting for the agent to return. I was surprised that the FBI had let us be alone together for so long and I started to wonder if it was done on purpose. Even though they said that they hadn’t been monitoring me, I wouldn’t put that kind of thing past them. It didn’t matter now. They had caught me working a case they had explicitly asked me to stay out of. They had also caught me trying to take evidence from a crime scene. It couldn’t get any worse than this.

We watched as a Crime Scene Unit arrived at the warehouse and parked next to us. I saw a detective and a technician, two guys I knew and had worked with in the past, exit the van and glare at me as they walked inside, hauling their equipment to document and supervise the collection of evidence.

A minute later, the agent who had escorted us to the SUV showed up again. He started the ignition and we were off. He drove down Sayre and turned onto 62
nd
street and hung a left onto New England. I looked outside the passenger window and saw the doors of my truck open and the FBI searching every inch of it.

“That must be the kid,” Jami said. I turned my head and saw on the other side of the street a CPD patrol car. A teenager was leaned against it, pointing in the direction of the warehouse that we had come from and talking with a Chicago policeman and one of the FBI agents.

The agent driving didn’t say a word to us. The man seemed upset about something and I wondered what may have happened that Jami and I didn’t know about. He raised the volume of his police radio to better hear dispatch. The woman on the other end of the radio was communicating with agents in the field using police codes to help mask what they were talking about.

Dispatch calls law enforcement officers in the field every five minutes or so to ask for a status to make sure their agents are okay. They hadn’t yet called on the man driving us but I knew that they would soon if he didn’t contact them first. I listened carefully to make sure I wouldn’t miss any communication between the agent and dispatch.

When I first started in this line of work, I’d let kids around the age of the teenager that we drove past come along with me for what we called ride-alongs. They were always amazed at how we communicated over the radio. It sounded like gibberish to them but with practice, new law enforcement officers picked up the lingo pretty easily. Dispatch wasn’t saying a lot and I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the window.

“One-twenty-one to dispatch, I need a Code 20 update on the 207,” the agent driving said with a shaky voice. I was startled and opened my eyes. A Code 20 was a request for an update on a newsworthy event.
Did I really just hear that?
I thought to myself.
What had happened to Senator Keller?

“Dispatch 10-69,” the response came, acknowledging the request. A few second later, his cell phone rang.

“Hey sir,” the agent said. Jami and I could hear the voice of another man talking on the other end of the line but couldn’t hear the words over the road noise. “Tonight?” the agent said, and the caller continued speaking. “I understand, I’m almost there,” he said and disconnected the call.

“What happened?” I asked. It was the first time I had tried to talk with the agent. He didn’t acknowledge me. “Did something happen to the senator?” I asked and the agent looked at me in his rearview mirror.

I saw him look back at the road, wearing aviator sunglasses – it was hard to read the expression on his face but I could tell by his shaky voice that he was very concerned about something, so much so that he couldn’t wait until he returned to get an update.

“I know who you are, Agent Jordan,” he said. “I respect you and what you do but you know that I can’t give you any information on this.”

We arrived at the FBI’s Chicago office about twenty minutes later. The agent driving took interstate 55 to 290. The streets were now barren, a stark contrast to an hour earlier when Jami and I had fought our way past Midway traffic to get to the warehouse. When we drove through a checkpoint at Damen and Roosevelt, I knew that the city had been placed on a curfew and the citizens asked to stay off of the roads.

The agent driving us pulled into the building. It was like a long carport that extended from one end of the building to the other. They had a fancier setup than we had at DDC, definitely more secure than ours. He stopped the car in the middle, stepped out, and opened our door. Two new agents took over from there.

Although I had driven by their building every day since it was so close to DDC, I had never been inside. As a spinoff from the CIA, we had access to their intelligence technology. We tried to take the best from each agency when we formed DDC to be as effective as possible for handling domestic terrorism.

They had a team of analysts out on the floor and a large screen on the wall like DDC, but instead of streaming video, it showed the entire Keller operational plan and the status of each agent’s assignment. I saw our names next to Agent 121, who I knew was the man who had driven us in. The status next to our names read
captured
. We were being treated like hostiles. From their position, I couldn’t blame them.

The agent walking with Jami hung a right and took her down a hallway and stopped at a holding room. I looked at the man escorting me and he said, “Keep walking.” They were finally going to split us up.

I figured that this was the standard FBI playbook. First, they’d split us up and prepare a list of questions. Then they’d ask each of us the same set of questions and compare our responses. The Bureau was already throwing multiple charges at Jami and me, and if they wanted to, they could go as far as they wanted to get information out of us. Based on the severity of the case, I knew that they just might do that.

A few seconds later, we also hung a right and stopped in front of another holding room. I thought the corridor we were in must have curved around and led to the room that Jami had been taken to. The agent punched a code into the keypad and the door unlocked. We walked inside and he removed my handcuffs.

“Take a seat,” he said. “And make yourself comfortable. You’re going to be here for a while.”

Then the agent left and I was alone.

There was a large metal table in the center of the room and four chairs. A two-way mirror stretched the length of one of the walls. I paced the floor for a while, trying to make sense of everything that had happened. I thought about the flash drive and what information might be on it. I wondered what the Code 20 was all about, what event had taken place that would have warranted a city-wide curfew to be declared.

My legs got tired after what felt like an eternity that I had been standing in the room, so I pulled back one of the metal chairs and sat down at the table and thought some more. What did the marking on the metal pipe mean and was it even from Keller or had it been there before? I thought about the kid who had discovered the senator’s location and I wondered why he had been in the warehouse with Keller.

Then my thoughts drifted back to my dad. Jim Keller was a friend to me, but had been like a brother to him. Despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to save the senator.

“Wake up! Damn you, wake up!” Victor Perez yelled as he drove the van, speeding through the unpaved backroads that led to the home deep in the woods, forty-five miles away from the warehouse. He had planned to work from that deserted building in Chicago’s south side, but things changed quickly when his location was discovered by that kid. This was his Plan B.

Perez pulled into the driveway and jumped out of the van and opened the cargo doors in the back. At the same time, a woman in her mid-thirties came out of the house. She was wearing blue scrubs and had just come home from her job as a nurse at the local hospital. “What’s wrong? What do you need?” she asked.

“He’s unconscious again and doesn’t seem to be breathing well,” Perez said and the woman jogged to the senator to see for herself. She pulled up his eyelids and saw that his eyes were rolling. She put an ear to the senator’s mouth while at the same time grabbed his arm and placed two fingers on his wrist.

“Pulse is weak… he’s wheezing, sounds like his airways are closing. This is bad. I’ll be right back, don’t move him,” the woman said and disappeared back into the home.

Jim Keller had started to convulse on the drive to the house, but the kidnapper was unable to do anything about it. He couldn’t stop the van because he knew that every minute that passed he came that much closer to being caught. He needed to get to the secluded home as quickly as possible.

Perez looked down the path that led to the driveway. Although he had been to the home many times, he had never really paid attention to the surroundings. He was relieved to see that the closest neighbor was over a hundred yards away and the house couldn’t even be seen because of the overgrowth of underbrush and the massive oak trees that were scattered in every direction.

Since he couldn’t see the neighbors, he knew that they couldn’t see what was happening in the driveway. Perez felt safe here.

The woman ran back outside carrying an injector in one of her hands. For the past three months, she had been taking home several types of medications from her nursing job at a local correctional facility, a job she took because of the lack of oversight. Some were antipsychotics intended to subdue their victims. These strong sedatives could safely put a person to sleep for hours. But she had also taken medication to increase blood pressure and help wake up a patient that may be unconscious, which she hoped would help wake up the senator now.

“Stand back,” she said as she held the epinephrine injector upright with the black tip pointed down. She stood over Keller’s body which Perez had carefully pulled closer to the back of the van. With her other hand, the woman pulled off the gray cap and positioned her hand over the senator’s outer thigh.

She slowly tipped the injector so that it was at a ninety degree angle to Keller’s leg and quickly lowered her hand with enough force to pierce the skin and jab through the dress pants that the senator wore.

The woman counted to ten and then removed the injector. She threw it on the ground and placed both hands over the area where she had administered the shot and rubbed gently to encourage the adrenaline to move throughout the man’s body. She counted to ten again and then took a few steps back.

“It didn’t work,” Perez said. “I need him conscious or this will all be for nothing.”

“Just wait,” the woman said. A few seconds later, Jim Keller’s eyes opened and he started coughing violently. Keller gasped for air and sat up in the van. “Take deep breaths,” the woman said to him and the senator started breathing more easily. “You need to learn to control your temper,” she said to Perez and walked back to the house.

“Move,” the kidnapper said as the senator got to his feet. Perez closed the van doors and grabbed the gun tucked inside his belt. “Get in the house,” he said and Keller headed toward the front door.

Around noon, I heard the sound of codes being entered into the keypad outside of my holding room. An orderly walked in, followed by Agent Landry. “I thought I told you this wasn’t your operation,” Landry said. I started to get up. “Stay seated, Agent Jordan,” Landry barked at me.

The orderly placed a meal on the table for me and left. Landry stayed standing and crossed his arms.

“I guess I didn’t make myself clear back at the United Center. I told you to stay out of this,” he said sternly.

“You know I couldn’t do that.”

“Because of your job or because he’s your friend?” I glared back at the man.

“Both,” I said. “I screwed up. It happened on my watch, like you said. I needed to make this right. If I would have arrived sooner, I could have rescued him.” I thought about John Burnett. Getting the location of the warehouse from the man had taken longer than it should have. And that made all the difference.

“We’ll be keeping you under our jurisdiction until we get the senator back. Roger Shapiro is on board. As you know, you’ve been relieved of your duties at DDC and he’s appointed Chris Reed as interim special agent in charge. I need to understand everything that you’ve been involved in over the past sixteen hours, so I’ll have Agent Mallory meet with you shortly. We’ll hand you over to Shapiro when this is all over.”

“I want to know what’s happened since I was arrested at the warehouse.” Landry shook his head.

“Agent Jordan, you’re being treated as a suspect. For all I know, you’re involved in this somehow.” I stood up.

“Damn you, Bill,” I yelled. “You know my involvement. Jim Keller is a friend of mine. He’s like a father. He trained me to become a SEAL and I owe him everything. You know all of this already.”

“Take a seat,” Landry finally said. I sat back down and composed myself before continuing.

“While Agent Davis and I were being brought in, I heard dispatch reference a Code 20. A newsworthy event. What happened? Is the senator okay?” Landry hesitated and then pulled back one of the chairs and sat down at the table.

“The kidnapper made contact,” he said. I was shocked to hear this.

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t call us or the media. He posted a video online. He was masked and held a sign that said
Execution at dusk
. Then the camera panned to the senator. It was brief, but Keller looked bad. Maybe unconscious.”

“Where was the video taken?” Landry shook his head.

“From inside the kidnapper’s van, we think. His location was identified as being a few miles away from the warehouse.” I set my crossed arms on the table and leaned in.

“Bill, you have to let me help you. Look how far I got with absolutely no resources. I found the warehouse before your guys got there. Nobody knows Keller better than I know him. Please – we only have a few hours until sundown. Give me a chance,” I said with conviction.

Landry stood and pushed the chair in. “I don’t have to do anything,” he said, as his tone changed. “You should have left the investigation to us. And like I said, you could be feeding me a bunch of BS right now. We’ll know soon.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Landry turned around when he got to the door.

“Agent Mallory will be in soon. You need to tell him everything. If he suspects you’re lying or withholding the truth on anything, he’s got authority to call in help to make you talk. You don’t want him to do that. I want to know everything. The United Center, David Mitchell, John Burnett, the flash drive…
everything
.”

Landry left and the door closed. There was absolutely nothing I could do now. Jim Keller would be executed in a matter of hours, the FBI had no leads, and I was stuck in a holding room unable to help. I had never felt so helpless in my life. I sat in the cold room with my hands holding the back of my head with my elbows resting on the table. I had tried my best. I had to face the reality that I would not be saving Jim Keller from certain death today and that my journey was over.