The Senator: A Blake Jordan Thriller (4 page)

Speeding through the streets of southeast Chicago was not what David Mitchell had planned for tonight.

The stories he wrote for the various news organizations that he worked for over the last nine years since graduating college had always been from the field, so being close to a story wasn’t anything new. Although he took a lot of heat and ultimately got fired for embellishing many of his stories, like adding that gunshots rang out from a drive by while interviewing a local business owner about nearby gang violence when that never actually happened.

He wondered if anyone would even believe him about whatever it was that he was witnessing. After being busted for exaggerating the last story he wrote for the Tribune, he had been given fifteen minutes to pack up his things and was escorted out of the building. Being fired for lying is hard to make a comeback from. No other paper would touch him. He had no choice than to start his own news Website.

And that worked out perfectly fine for David Mitchell. It was all about him, anyway. He liked the attention his stories got him. He loved reading the emails and social media comments from his stories. He got a lot of hate mail which he seemed to enjoy reading even more than his fan mail.
For every hater, there’s a thousand fans out there that love me
, he thought to himself.

The van Mitchell was following slowed down as they reached a rundown industrial part of Chicago’s south side. He created a buffer between the van carrying the body of the older man and himself. He didn’t want to be seen or heard as they reached wherever it was that they were going.

Mitchell drove into the old industrial park, packed with office buildings that looked like they hadn’t been used in years. With the sun having set two hours earlier, it was hard to make out a lot of what he was seeing. But from the dark streets, he could tell that this wasn’t an area that was visited by very many people. Some of the buildings had driveways overgrown with grass or had junk cars parked in them.

He looked behind to make sure nobody was following. He felt goosebumps on his skin underneath his leather jacket and also felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

Just as Mitchell turned a corner, his cell phone rang. “This is Mitchell,” he said as he continued to follow the van from a safe distance.

“David, it’s John. Are you still at the United Center?” David thought for a moment how he should answer. “Something’s happened…” the caller said. “What do you mean something’s happened?” David asked while trying to concentrate on the road. “Senator Keller never gave his speech. He was supposed to go on at eight o’clock and never showed up.”

Mitchell didn’t know what to say. “David? Did I lose you?” the caller asked.

“Let me call you back,” David said and hung up. He realized in that moment that the driver of the van he was following was a kidnapper. And the gray-haired man in the business suit was Senator Jim Keller, nominee for President of the United States.
My God
Mitchell thought to himself as he drove on.

He started to dial 911.
I’ll be a hero
, he thought, as he envisioned his name all over the TV as the person who found and saved the kidnapped senator. Then, other thoughts filled his head. Mitchell thought about what might happen if he called this in and he wasn’t credited as the person who found the senator. It would be better to break the story himself and drip the information slowly, revealing more details every few hours to drive traffic back to his Website.

Besides, he wasn’t a fan of Keller’s, or anything he or his party believed in.
Let him suffer a little
, he thought, and laughed. David Mitchell was now in complete control of the biggest story of his life.

There was a sound in the back of Victor Perez’s van as he approached the warehouse he had been working from for the last two weeks. He looked over his shoulder and saw Jim Keller starting to come to. After Perez cold-cocked him with his gun, the senator had already blacked out. “We’re almost there,” Perez said as the senator lifted his head and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what was going on.

Keller’s body was numb. He clenched his fists repeatedly, trying to regain feeling in them.
Chloroform
, he thought to himself. His vision was blurry and his hearing seemed to be muffled. Keller couldn’t quite make out the words from the man driving the vehicle.

Perez pulled the van into the short loading dock of one of the abandoned warehouses and got out. He entered a code into a padlock and removed it, allowing him to pull up a large bay door twenty feet long and fifteen feet high. He climbed back into the van, pulled it inside, and lowered the door again. From inside the bay, he pushed a metal slider bar to the left of the door in place, locking it from the inside.

There was a lot of room inside the bay. The kidnapper had a generator running at the far end of the room, opposite from the bay door. It powered six fluorescent lights in the ceiling, illuminating the bay, and powered two additional rooms further inside the building that Perez would use for a workstation and prison cell. The rest of the dark and cold warehouse remained unused.

Victor Perez walked to the back of the van, opened the doors, and looked at the senator, still trying to make sense of everything that was happening. “Are you going to be a problem, Mr. Keller?” he asked and the senator noticed a slight accent. His body still felt numb. His limbs had the same uncomfortable tingling feeling as when they would fall asleep. It was difficult to move, but he managed to sit up.

“Screw you,” Keller said with a slur, and noticed that his tongue had that same tingly feeling as the rest of his body, making it close to impossible to speak normally. Perez laughed and dug his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Keller watched the kidnapper intently, wondering if the madman was making himself comfortable on the chilly night or if he had something he was keeping hidden in one of the pockets.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” Keller managed to slur, eyes still fixed on his kidnapper.

“I already have,” Perez replied. He pulled out of his right pocket a small plastic black and yellow Taser gun, an X26. He pointed it at the senator’s chest. Before the senator could realize what was happening, the kidnapper squeezed the trigger and two small dart-like barbs pierced Jim Keller’s white dress shirt and buried themselves deep into his skin.

An electric shock sent Keller into a convulsion on the van floor and a moment later, he was unconscious again. Two droplets of blood started to appear and stained his shirt. Perez climbed into the van, uncuffed the senator, and dragged his body out and pulled him inside the warehouse where he handcuffed him once again, this time to a large metal pipe inside the crude cell that he had created.

Perez stood back and thought through everything that he had done that night, retracing his steps to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He walked into the next room, adjacent to where the unconscious senator laid slouched over and handcuffed to a pipe that ran from the ceiling all the way down to the floor of his new cell before curving toward the outside of the building.

He turned on a television that picked up one of the city’s local over-the-air stations. The FOX affiliate was simulcasting FOX News Channel programming. Perez changed the channel to NBC who was broadcasting MSNBC coverage. He was thrilled to see that the kidnapping had caused alarm and panic with the media.

It was a strange feeling to be following a kidnapper into an abandoned industrial park. Dangerous, even. But David Mitchell was desperate to prove his worth as a journalist. This was the kind of story that could help him show the world just how great he really was.

Mitchell watched the black van turn one more time, travelling down what he would soon find in another minute or two was a dead-end street. As he got to the corner and made the realization, he turned his engine off and walked the bike down a side alley and hid it behind an old rusted dark green dumpster that sat in between two decaying buildings.

As he walked back to the road with one streetlight illuminating the entire block, he heard what sounded like a garage door being pulled closed.

Where did that come from?
He asked himself as he stood on the crumbling concrete in the middle of the dead-end road. Slowly and ever so quietly, he inched his way past the buildings looking for a sign – any sign – that might give a clue for which one hid the van and the senator.

Mitchell passed a few more brick buildings that looked like they might topple over should a strong wind pass through and wondered to himself how the entire area had become so run down. It was a sharp contrast to the buildings he used to walk past on his way to work on The Magnificent Mile where the city’s ritziest hotels, restaurants, and businesses called home.

The temperature started to drop more rapidly after nightfall. David Mitchell’s heart pounded in his chest and he could hear the beating in his ears. The last time he was this on edge, he had been out on assignment for an article he was trying to write on gang violence. He had spent a day on the south side of the city where the King Cobras and the City Boys ruled the streets whenever the cops were out of sight. After walking the streets for an hour, he entered a diner to find some breakfast and also found his story. Two City Boys walked in and pulled a gun on the cashier of The Eatery near Evergreen Park. The thug pointed the weapon around the room and looked about as scared as Mitchell.

He had a way of finding himself in the middle of every story, but always had to take things to the next level by adding unnecessary embellishments for show. In the gang article, he wrote that the older City Boy had roughed him up when in reality, he had remained quiet, arms folded, and stone-faced the entire time. Even now, he thought about the best way to break this story. It needed to be done
with flair
.

When Mitchell got to the second to last warehouse on the right side of the road, he stopped. A faint groaning sound came from the building marked
2300
. He walked up the loading dock and put an ear to the bay door. The groaning stopped but was replaced by a dragging sound. A moment later, it was gone. He stayed listening, hoping to hear more, but the sounds left as quickly as they had come and were replaced by a cold wind that was growing stronger by the minute.

I found him
, he thought, and walked back to his bike, still tucked away behind the green dumpster where he had hidden it just five minutes earlier. He pushed it down the alley, out onto the street, and steered it back onto the main road that brought him there before climbing back on and kick starting it.

David Mitchell picked up speed as he bolted out of the battered mess of buildings but was careful not to rev his engine more than necessary. He didn’t want to scare off the kidnapper before he could get back to his bachelor pad apartment in the Gold Coast District and write the biggest story of his life.

Jami didn’t say much as we made our way back to the United Center. I had hoped that somehow, some way, we would find the guy on the motorcycle but knew that would be next to impossible. My cell phone rang. It was my dad. I sent the call to voicemail and stuffed my cell back in the pocket of my windbreaker.

“How do you know him?” Jami asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence. I turned and looked at her before refocusing my eyes on the road.

“He’s a family friend.”

“No, there’s more to it. I can tell. How do you know Keller?” I waited for a few seconds before answering, considering how much to reveal.

“Keller and my dad worked together at the Chicago ATF field office. They met after my family moved here the summer before my senior year in high school. Our families have known each other for a long time.”

“Where did you move from?”

“Oklahoma.”

“I never would have guessed that,” Jami said. “Why did your family move to Chicago?”

“Timothy McVeigh,” I answered and looked back over to Jami who didn’t respond.

“Before being relocated to the Chicago office, my dad worked out of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I was a junior in high school and one day right before the end of the semester, I got to school and realized that I had forgotten my football jersey at home and needed it for practice. It was just past eight and I figured my dad would still be home, so I called him. He said he’d bring it by before work.

“I met him out front and he dropped off the jersey just before nine. I found out a few minutes later that the building had been bombed.” Jami was still looking at me.

“I’m so sorry...”

“He was fine, Jami. My dad had still been on the road when McVeigh bombed the place.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then we left. My dad was transferred to the Chicago office and so our family moved the summer before my senior year. That’s when he met Jim Keller, another agent out of Chicago. Their offices were next to each other and they became good friends. Best friends, actually.”

“That’s when everything changed. Up until then, I wasn’t sure what I would do after graduation. After that summer, when the fog lifted and I saw true evil for the first time in my life, I decided that after I graduated that next year, I would join the military. I wanted to be a SEAL.”

“And that’s what you did,” Jami added.

“I see you’ve done your homework.”

“It was all I thought about. My dad knew that his buddy Keller was a SEAL before joining the ATF, so he asked him for advice on what his kid could do. Our families had become good friends over that summer. We lived close to each other and we had them over all of the time. They did the same. Keller knew me. I was young, but he knew I was serious. Keller was also getting ready to retire from the agency the following year and run for office, so he made a deal with my dad. He said that if my dad would help with his campaign for senate, Keller would train me. He couldn’t guarantee I’d make the cut. That was up to me. But he’d give me a pretty good shot.”

I turned right on Damen and headed north. We were almost back at the arena.

“Had to be at his house every day at four o’clock in the morning for a year. He had me swimming, running, weight-lifting. He trained me in basic combat. Gave me a head start before I even enlisted. I owe him a lot.”

“So that’s why you’re here. I was wondering why the head of the Chicago division of DDC would be out in the field. That’s not how it usually works. You’re beyond doing field work now, you don’t need to be here.”

“It might not be the norm, but it’s how I do things. If I think I need to be in the field, I’m going to be there. In case something goes wrong.” To that, Jami gave me a look as if she was going to say something but decided against it as we parked back in the same spot as before. I closed my eyes and shook my head.