Hunting Zero (An Agent Zero Spy Thriller—Book #3)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The man immediately outside the door, the one who had kicked it in, was the large bald man that Reid had spoken to earlier. He filled the narrow doorway, shoulders heaving, gaze angry—and was met with the barrel of a pistol three feet from his face.

Reid had the Glock aloft, gripped in both hands. He didn’t want to shoot anyone, but he wasn’t lying when he told Bill that nothing, no one, would get between him and his girls.

For a moment neither man spoke; they simply stared.

At long last the large dock worker put his hands up slowly. “Hey,” he said. “Nobody needs to get hurt here, all right?”

“Back up,” Reid ordered. “Get back.”

The man took a step back, down the three wooden steps that led up to the trailer, all without taking his eyes off of Reid or the gun. The workers behind him backed up as well, slowly. Reid noted with some dismay that some of them wielded pipes, wrenches, lengths of chain—Bill had been right. They took care of their own.

They just don’t know that their own aids and abets human trafficking.

Reid stood in the trailer’s doorway, his gun up but not pointed directly at any one of them. He mustered a clear, strong voice as he said, “Most of you are likely innocent in this—maybe all of you. But if you make a move, I will shoot you.”

The large man at the head of the dock-working mob frowned deeply. “Innocent? What are you talking about?”

“Your boss, Bill, is part of a trafficking ring,” Reid told them. “He was helping a group of foreigners move abducted girls out of the country.”

“Nah. No way.” The big man shook his head. “I’ve known that man for sixteen years. I don’t believe that.”

You’d be surprised what people are capable of. He couldn’t help but think of his late wife, Kate, and his children, unknowing for his entire CIA career.

Reid knew he was not going to be able to convince these men of the truth—and there was no point in doing so anyway. He didn’t have to prove it to them; he had to prove it to the authorities. But he did have to make it off the docks alive.

He took the first wooden step down, tracking the barrel left to right as the dock workers spread, taking small steps backward and fanning out into a semicircle. They were looking for an opening, an opportunity to disarm him. And then…

“Jesus!” someone shouted. Without Reid blocking the doorway, the inside of the trailer was visible—as was Bill, lying on the floor, his face purple and one hand mangled and breath labored.

“Somebody call the cops!” another crew member said.

Reid moved off the last stair and kept the trailer to his back, sidestepping parallel to it. He needed to get back to the car, to get the hell out of there. The big man at the front of the crowd reached behind him; someone handed off a pipe wrench, nearly three feet long and at least twenty-five pounds.

That would crush my skull in one blow.

“Nobody needs to die tonight,” he reminded the crew. “Just back off, and I’ll leave—”

There was sudden movement in his periphery. A man with a handlebar mustache swung a length of chain, overhand, about six feet from him. Reid bladed his body, making himself a narrower target, as the chain whistled past his nose and smacked the ground angrily.

His reaction was all instinct. Someone had made a bid for him, and he returned it in kind. In a half second the Glock was up, under his elbow, and he fired a single shot.

The man yelped and fell as he took the bullet in the thigh.

The shot seemed impossibly loud in the open night air of the cargo port. The big man hefted the pipe wrench, bringing it up over his shoulder like a baseball bat.

Reid swung to his left and had the gun pointed at the man’s forehead before he could fully wind up. “Don’t,” he said hoarsely.

The large man froze, but kept the wrench back, over his shoulder, ready to swing. Two others hurried to their downed friend, who hissed breaths through his teeth as he gripped his thigh and groaned in pain.

I need to get out of here, now. He could make a run for it, sprint for the dirt bike he’d left behind, but his knee still wasn’t completely healed since he’d torn a tendon the month earlier. Some of these men looked like they were in good shape; he wasn’t confident he could outrun them. And if they caught up to him…

“You have kids of your own?” Reid asked the large man at the head of the dock mob. “I bet a lot of you do. Put yourselves in my shoes. My little girls went missing yesterday. And whether you believe it or not, your boss, he saw them. He watched them get put on a boat against their will. What would you do?”

“Not this,” the big man said somberly. “Not like this.”

“But you’d do something. You’d look for them. And if you knew that someone had seen them, and done nothing—”

“Let’s just rush him, Leon!” A man behind the larger one stared at Reid as he spoke to the mob leader. “He can’t shoot us all!”

“I can try,” Reid promised. “But I don’t want to do that. I just want to leave.”

The tension in the air crackled like electricity between them. Reid recognized this moment; the fuse had been lit and it was mere seconds before detonation, before these men got antsy, anxious, and did something brash. They wouldn’t stay at bay forever, and he would have to make some very difficult choices.

The lead man, Leon, tensed. The muscles in his thick forearms stood out in sharp relief as he tightened his grip around the pipe wrench, ready to swing.

But then—he frowned. Leon pulled his gaze away from the gun for just a second, c*****g his head slightly like a dog hearing a strange noise.

Then Reid heard it too. The sound of an engine, getting louder by the second. It was coming fast.

Tires squealed behind him, and an instant later the high beams came on, bright and blinding. The crowded dock workers squinted and shielded their eyes from the sudden blaze of light as a black sports car screeched to an abrupt stop just behind Reid, so close its right bumper nearly touched his thigh.

For the briefest of moments Reid thought it was the Trans Am that he had left behind in Virginia; he did a quick double-take and saw that it was a newer car, a recent model. Then a gruff voice called out to him through the open window.

“Get in.”

He didn’t wait around to wonder what was going on. With the gun still leveled at Leon, Reid took two quick steps backward and jumped into the passenger side of the car. His feet were barely off the ground before the driver slammed it into reverse.

Leon surged forward, swinging his pipe wrench down overhead. He caught the very front of the car’s hood, the wrench glancing off of it and leaving a sizeable dent as the car jolted backward.

The grizzled driver spun the wheel expertly. The back end of the sleek sports car swung out, fishtailing slightly, and then he threw it into drive while still moving. The driver mashed the gas pedal down and the car took off like a shot, doing sixty down the narrow cargo lane.

Reid breathed a heavy sigh. “Thanks again, Mitch.”

“Mm.” The bearded mechanic grunted in response.

Of course Reid had questions, but there were more pressing matters at the moment. He holstered his Glock and flipped the burner open as he did some mental math—the girls had a little more than a seventeen-hour lead on him. That was just barely enough time for the cargo ship to reach the southern tip of Nova Scotia, and for a plane from there to reach Dubrovnik, assuming that it was a direct flight path. With any luck, the plane they were on hadn’t landed yet.

He dialed Watson’s number. Pick up this time. Pick up…

The call was answered mid-ring, but Watson said nothing.

“It’s me,” Reid said quickly. “The girls were put on a boat to Nova Scotia, possibly one of the offshore islands, and from there a plane to Croatia. We need to contact all cargo depots in the province and have all planes grounded. Call the Dubrovnik authorities, have them send police to the airport to…” Reid trailed off. He heard nothing on the other line, not even the sound of breathing. “Hello? Watson, are you there?”

There was a long moment of silence before the woman on the other end of the line said, “Agent Watson is not available at the moment. But you can speak to me, Agent Steele.”