CHAPTER FOURTEEN
2098 Words
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Reid froze at the stern sound of the deputy director’s voice. “Riker,” he said softly.
Ashleigh Riker sighed irritably. “We told you, Zero. We warned you not to, and somehow you got Watson involved…”
“You’ve got it wrong. He had nothing to do with this,” Reid lied.
“He tipped his hand too far when he sent Agent Strickland leads through his own assets.” She scoffed through the phone. “I should have suspected something like this would happen.”
Reid pinched the bridge of his nose. If Watson had been discovered, then he no longer had an ally inside the agency; no tech to obtain satellite photos, no method of tracking leads. Worse still, the agency had the burner number—which meant they were undoubtedly tracking him at that very moment.
Then there’s no point in hiding anything from them.
“All right, listen to me,” Reid said quickly. “Rais has taken my girls out of the country. He made some kind of deal with a group of Slavic traffickers—”
“The assassin again,” Riker interrupted. “Do you have evidence? Did you see him?”
Reid grunted in frustration. “No. But I know it’s him—”
“And what were you going to do? Take on everyone by yourself? You tried that once before and it didn’t work out so well for you… or for us. Now you’ve already gone and made another mess—”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Reid said forcefully.
“No, you only injured and crippled them,” the deputy director shot back sardonically. “We connected the dots here. Two cops accosted in Maryland, the hotel clerk with the broken face, the shift supervisor at Port Jersey, a dockworker shot in the leg… You are out of control, again—”
Reid felt heat rising in his face despite the chilly air from the open passenger window. “We’re talking about my children here…”
“Yes, and we told you. This isn’t coming from me, or Cartwright, or even from Director Mullen. This is coming from the Director of National Intelligence. I would say you’re disavowed, but you were never really fully reinstated, so I don’t even know if I can disavow you.” Riker paused for a moment, her voice growing calm as she said, “Face facts, Agent Steele. You defied orders. You went rogue. You broke laws and interfered with an open investigation. Right now you are a criminal. You’re a vigilante that is considered armed and very dangerous. The FBI has been notified, as well as police departments across six states. If I have to alert Interpol, I will.”
“You don’t have to make this harder than it already is,” Reid implored. “We can work together. I’ve already gotten farther than Strickland on my own.”
“You made it harder on yourself.” Her voice was cold. There was no remorse in it. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to stop, right now, and you’re going to wait where you are with this phone number active until agents arrive. They will bring you back to Langley. If you do that, maybe, just maybe you’ll avoid prison.”
Reid gritted his teeth and glanced over at Mitch, stoically driving beside him. “I have another deal,” he said.
Riker scoffed. “You’re not in a position to make deals, Agent—”
“Shut up and listen,” he snapped. “I’m in a car headed north for Nova Scotia. I will turn it around and drive back to Langley, but only if you listen to what I have to say.”
The deputy director was silent for a moment. “How can I trust you’ll come in?”
“Because having my girls safe is the most important thing in the world to me right now. I can’t do anything alone with the information I have. You can. The agency can. If you do what I ask and find them, I’ll come in.”
“Tell me.”
“My daughters were put on a cargo ship that headed north at four o’clock this morning,” Reid explained quickly. “Its destination was a Nova Scotia depot, possibly one of the outlying islands. It would have arrived there hours ago; there’d be no way to catch up to it now, but I have it on authority that from there they would have been put on a plane and sent to Dubrovnik, in Croatia. Depending on the type of plane, they may not have arrived yet. We can search manifests, flight patterns, find out where they are and when they’ll get there. We can alert the Croatian authorities and get the police to the airport. If we have any agents in the area, we can get them there. Whatever we can do, do it, and I’ll come in. But we need to move now.”
“Fine. Consider it done.” Riker snapped her fingers to someone in the background. “But I’m sending a chopper to your location to pick you up. If I don’t see your face in the next hour, there won’t be a judge or a jury. Do you understand? There’s no due process for this. There’s only a hole.”
“Understood.” Reid snapped the phone shut, ending the call, and tossed the burner out the open window.
“You really think she’s going to do all that?” Mitch asked. “To find a couple of kids?”
“I don’t know.” I can only hope so. Reid stared out the window. Early on, Watson had told him that Cartwright was the one who put him up to it, had him help and supply Reid. Where was he in all this? What is he doing to help me—to help my girls?
“Where are we going?” Reid asked.
“Taking you to an airstrip in Hatfield,” Mitch grunted. “There’s a plane there. Assuming you still need one.”
He nodded. “I’m not stopping until I see their faces.” No matter what he told Riker, he wasn’t about to trust the fate of his daughters in the deputy director’s hands—or anyone else’s, for that matter. He had already come too far for that. “Where did you hide the tracking unit?”
He could surmise, just by Mitch’s sudden presence back at Port Jersey, that it wasn’t just the Trans Am that had been bugged. Mitch had followed him here, and while Reid had no idea how he’d gotten here so fast—by helicopter, or maybe even by the same type of drone that had delivered him to the motel—the mechanic was definitely still tracking him.
“It’s in the bag,” Mitch grunted. “Silicon transponder sewed into the fabric.”
Reid scoffed. Maria was right again; he really couldn’t trust anyone in this line of work. “Let me guess, John told you I’d do something stupid…”
“You did.” Mitch kept his eyes on the road, not looking over, barely blinking. “Those men might have killed you back there on the dock.”
And I might have killed some of them, Reid thought. He scrutinized the man behind the wheel—the thick, unruly beard; small, squinting eyes; baseball cap pulled over his hair and brow. “Can the agency track me with it?”
“Not unless they have the frequency and know it’s you.”
Reid thought for a moment. He had tossed the burner because the CIA now had the number and could use it to find his location, but it had also been his only line of communication to Maria. “Can you get that info to Johansson?”
Mitch nodded once.
So he knows her too. “Who are you really?” he asked.
“Mechanic,” Mitch said simply. “Friend of John’s.”
Sure, Reid thought. And I’m just a history professor. “You knew me. Before the memory suppressor, you knew me, didn’t you?”
“You knew me too.”
“But…” Reid turned the thought over in his mind like kneading dough. It seemed clear that Mitch wasn’t just an asset; he was CIA, and Reid was fairly certain that everything about his current identity, from his beard and hat to the gruff, grunting demeanor and even his name, was all just intrigue to hide his real identity.
Because a memory might spark in my mind. Because I might remember.
“But you don’t want me to remember,” he said.
“Some things are better left in the past,” Mitch said softly.
Reid wanted to press the issue. He wanted to remember as much as he could, but he knew better. After all, would he be honest about his identity to a relative stranger? Especially if he just wanted to help them?
They drove southwest for another ten minutes, doing ten over the speed limit and traveling in silence. Finally they pulled off the highway and eased down a long, tree-lined thoroughfare until they reached an access road and a sign for a place called Crosswind Airfield. It was comprised of little more than a squat office building, two narrow runways, and an open-air hangar that housed about a dozen or so small aircraft.
The lights were on, but Reid didn’t see any people. Instead of stopping the car at the office, Mitch circled it, around to the second runway behind the building.
Reid gaped in surprise. There was a plane waiting there, just as Mitch had said, obscured from the road by the office building—but it wasn’t just any plane.
“That’s a Cessna Citation.” Sitting before them was a nine-million-dollar business-class jet. Fifty-four-foot wingspan, top speed of five hundred sixty miles an hour.
“Mm-hmm.” Mitch seemed unimpressed.
“And the pilot?”
“Friend of mine,” Mitch said simply.
“A friend,” Reid murmured. This didn’t feel right at all, blindly trusting someone he didn’t know who refused to give up his identity. The Cessna, the drone, the Trans Am; Mitch watching his back, saving him three times now from bad situations—none of it felt right. Every instinct as an agent told him not to get on the plane.
“You know this is dangerous,” Reid said. “You know the kind of trouble this could bring you. I need to know why you’re doing all this for me.”
“Like John told you,” Mitch said gruffly. “Not doing it for you. Doing it for those girls.”
“You’re stepping way out of line for this.” Reid shook his head. “You feel that you owe me something, don’t you? Is this some sort of atonement?”
Mitch said nothing in response.
“All right. Then I’ll find my own way.” He didn’t trust it enough to put his faith in someone who couldn’t give him a straight answer. He reached for the door handle.
“Hold up, Zero.”
Reid paused, his hand on the door.
The mechanic took off his baseball cap and ran a hand over his matted brown hair. “Back then… not just two years ago, but even before that… I wasn’t exactly a good person. I did something stupid. Got in deep. Not only did you save my life, but you covered for me. You made it so I stayed out of H-6.”
Reid tried to evoke a memory, but nothing came to him out of Mitch’s vague explanation. No new memories sparked in his brain.
“I never got the chance to repay the favor, until now. But when John told me about the suppressor, I didn’t want you to remember.” Mitch pulled his hat back on and cleared his throat. “Because if you remembered who I was, our history, you might not trust me. Might not accept my help.”
Reid bit his lip. He didn’t know what to say, or even think. Mitch was admitting that he was some untrustworthy aspect of Kent Steele’s past, but at the same time he had proven himself beneficial and supportive. As an agent, his instinct was to mistrust, to avoid, to lie and to deceive.
As a father, he was grateful beyond words.
He reached into his pocket for the ID card that was stowed there. “Here. This is the driver’s license of William Johnson. He’s the crew supervisor at Port Jersey who’s been accepting bribes and allowing a group of men he calls ‘the Slavs’ to take girls out of the country by cargo ship. I don’t trust Riker as far as I can throw her. You personally make sure he gets what’s coming to him and we’ll call this favor even.”
Mitch took the ID and looked it over. “I will.”
“And whatever you can do to follow up in Nova Scotia, in Croatia…”
“We will.”
Reid nodded. “Thank you, Mitch.” He shook the mechanic’s hand. “And be careful. If the CIA knows I’m in on this then they might know about the drone, or find out about the plane.”
“I’ll be fine,” he grunted.
Reid reached again for the door handle and pushed it open. As he climbed out, a thought occurred to him. Mitch’s words ran through his head. Not only did you save my life, but you covered for me. I never got the chance to repay the favor, until now.
He bent at the waist and peered into the cab of the car. “And Watson? What was his angle on this? Why did he help me?” He couldn’t believe that it was merely Cartwright’s suggestion that spurred Watson into action.
Mitch didn’t look up. “That’s not for me to say. I hope you get the chance to ask him yourself.”
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Me too. Thanks again, Mitch.” He hitched his bag onto his shoulder and strode toward the waiting Cessna. As he approached, the entry ramp came down and a man stood in the open oval-shaped doorway—the pilot, Reid presumed. He was white, tall, with a square jaw, but that was about all Reid could tell. Despite the darkness outside he wore aviator sunglasses and a black baseball cap.
Reid ascended the stairs and held out his hand. “Thanks for your help,” he said. “I’m Reid—”
The pilot gave him a tight smile. “Nothing personal, but the less I know about you, the better.”
Reid nodded. “Understood.” He took a seat as the entry ramp closed again and the pilot retreated to the cockpit. In minutes they were in the air, the barely illuminated sports car below getting smaller by the second.
He was on his way, and he had a long flight ahead of him to figure out how he was going to bait and kill the man who took his girls.
- Writer
