Voice of fear, p.8
Voice of Fear, page 8
“There’s someone out there who would still like to use us to control others,” a worn-looking brunette said, but she smiled at Patrick. “Please don’t get me wrong in any way—we are so grateful to be rescued. But...”
“You’re worried about the future, of course,” Patrick said. He offered them a smile. “We’re all human. Please believe we will do our best. We don’t want to see this happen to anyone ever again.”
A tiny blonde in her early twenties stepped forward. She was nervous; she wanted to speak, but she was afraid.
“There’s another house,” she said.
He looked at her curiously. Jordan came around to join him, frowning as they both studied the woman.
“I was there briefly. It’s in Central Virginia. There’s an old church that was deconsecrated in an old cemetery right by a federal reserve, and there’s a wedge of what I’d guess might be private property there. There’s an old mansion there that probably dates back to the Civil War, and it looks like it was abandoned. They had a few people there, and—” She broke off, closing her eyes, straining for breath. “They closed the trunk on me, but I could still hear the guards talking. I don’t know who he was, but they killed a man there and stuck him in the old cemetery, saying no one would ever know, how it was almost a year ago, and yet they still talked about it and laughed about it and... I know there are others there because there was a woman with me who was dropped off there. They had me in one car, and I saw them take her from the trunk of another car before the door was slammed shut on me.”
“Thank you, thank you, sincerely, thank you,” Patrick said. He nodded to Jordan. They’d get the message to Jackson if he hadn’t heard it through the mics, but when he rushed back down the stairs, he found Jackson was already on his cell phone, describing the location so Angela could work her internet magic and find out where it was.
Patrick waited until Jackson ended the call.
“Should we move?”
“As soon as Angela finds exactly where we need to be. She believes she knows the place, and it’s truly desolate, but thankfully, not far. I’ll get you GPS coordinates. Angela believes it’s the old Mayfield estate. The family died out at the turn of the century and the property remains private, but it’s owned by a corporation and usually leased out to movie companies. I’m guessing someone pulling strings rented it for a few years. Hang on, Angela is calling back.” He nodded at Patrick and set his phone on speaker.
“All right, I believe I am right about the location. Hanson and Associates owns the property. They’re located in LA, and this is the company’s only holding in the area. They hired a local caretaker, and I’m going to guess he might be one of the thugs keeping the others prisoner. As far as they know, everything is fine with their rental—paid on time, no damage reports—anyway, sending the info. The house is set back and never had a paved road. There is a path through the cemetery. The church is more of a little chapel with catacombs and a surrounding graveyard. We need to be careful moving in.”
“We’ll park in the cemetery, out of view,” Patrick promised. “I’ll grab Jordan and we’ll go.”
“Take care,” Angela warned him. “So far, they don’t seem to have any far-reaching camera views. You shouldn’t be going without backup, though.”
“That’s fine. Send backup. But make sure they know they need to stay back until they hear from one of us,” Patrick said.
“Our people know the dangers,” Jackson assured him. “You and Jordan can get going. I’ll get this group to headquarters for interrogation—and get the women and children to safety.”
“Thank you,” Patrick said.
“You’ve been in this from the beginning; we wouldn’t be where we are now without you. Let’s hope the third site is the last.”
“Yes, let’s hope so. And soon, today if possible, I want to interview Rory Ayers. One of the guards at the first location mentioned the fact people had thought they were safe before. They heard whispers saying ‘he’ was locked up, but more people died. I think Ayers has somehow still been running things from his cell.”
“We have gone after Ayers again and again. We thought he was getting messages out about who he wanted kidnapped and killed. But if so, it’s going to be hard to find the truth. We’ve got a problem there,” Jackson added grimly.
“What?”
“Ayers was found hanging in his cell, suicide attempt or maybe a murder attempt by a damned magician. He’s in the hospital ward, in a coma.”
Five
Dusk was coming when they reached the site of the old Victorian mansion that was hopefully the last holding site for the loved ones of the crime lord’s minions.
Strange light fell over the landscape. Mauves, grays, and streaks of yellow, gold, and pink were floating across the sky, casting an eerie illumination over the old chapel and graveyard. Jordan had always thought she knew the area well—DC, Northern Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia. And she did. She’d been to colonial parks and dozens of historic places.
But this was different. Abandoned and neglected. A soft lichen or moss seemed to have crept around gravestones, tombs, and monuments. There was a sense of loss and decay about the place, as if it had been lost in time, left to another world.
They didn’t venture into the graveyard once Patrick had parked the car. Instead, they crept along the tree line until they saw the old house in front of them.
Once she had been a grand dame, standing tall and narrow with impressive turrets and two towers, bay windows, and a semicircular porch with handsome columns.
But the paint was peeling, a few of the decorative gingerbread boards were dangling from the porch’s overhang. Old cars sat out front, and there was a playset on a patch of grass that had been poorly mowed.
Jordan didn’t realize she had stopped just behind an old oak until Patrick looked at her with a frown.
“Jordan?”
She shook her head and sighed. “That playground is right across the road from a small mausoleum with a broken door, and all those headstones with weeds growing all over them, an angel with broken wings, and aboveground single tombs that look like—”
“They’re right out of a horror movie?” Patrick said. “Yep. Thankfully, children are resilient.”
“You read the minds of little ones, too?” she asked.
“Sometimes. But also my dad had a friend who lived to be one hundred and two—after having spent several of his childhood years in a concentration camp during World War II. He and the other children knew people were killed daily and that it could be them at any time. But they learned how to find hope and live every moment, continuing to play. I grant you, they may need help. Some people survive bad situations better than others. But, Jordan, we’re going to get in there and see to it they have a chance.”
“Okay, what’s the plan?” she asked. He had discussed the situation with Jackson at the last site. She had stayed with the women and children until he and Jackson had joined, with Jackson detailing how they needed to get them all out without being seen. She had then followed Patrick out and back to the service road and the car.
“We let him know we’re here and see if he’s gotten anything off satellite data,” Patrick said.
She nodded.
She wanted to get in and get the last of the hostages saved, and she wanted for this very long day to be over.
Her mic made a soft whistling sound in her ear and then she heard Jackson speaking softly.
“Okay, so, they’re really not expecting anyone here. No one outside; we’ve picked up just seven heat sensors. It’s hard to tell which ones are guards and which are hostages. Two are in each tower. One in what we believe to be the dining room; two in the kitchen. There appears to be no one outside in the rear. There is a parlor, and the dining room is next to it on the left side of the entry with the kitchen in back. There are three rooms to the right of the entry, all empty.”
“Windows?” Jordan said.
“My thoughts, too,” Jackson said.
She looked at Patrick.
“Windows,” he agreed. He smiled grimly at Jordan. “Let’s move in.”
She nodded.
They both drew their weapons and moved swiftly through the trees and the narrow strip of grass that bordered the house. Nodding to one another, they took side-by-side windows. She looked at him and knew he would hold steady as she went first.
There was no challenge to getting in. The window was open. She hopped onto the sill and quickly crawled in. The room was someone’s office. It was empty.
She looked out the window and nodded to Patrick. Pausing, she listened. No sound. She carefully headed to the door to the hall and looked out. Seconds later, Patrick appeared. He shook his head.
No one, so far.
“Damn, make it decent! You’re supposed to be a cook, right?”
They could hear the irritated male voice from the other side of the house. Jordan knew she and Patrick were making the same calculations. In the kitchen, one captor, one prisoner.
Who was in the dining room? They had to see before they could save the “cook.”
Patrick signaled to her that he would start across the parlor. She would cover him. He was halfway across when she heard someone coming down the wooden steps of the handsomely carved staircase in the parlor before them. She saw Patrick carefully ease behind a faded antique love seat.
The person came down. It was a man of about forty, a pistol tucked into his waistband. He strode toward the dining room and kitchen area, calling out, “Hey! What’s the story? Food anytime soon? Hell, it’s almost dark outside and I’m starving!”
Jordan hadn’t realized just how good Patrick was at what he did until that moment. He rose from his position with absolute silence, caught the man in a headlock that instantly cut off his windpipe and any possibility of him screaming. Within seconds, he lowered the man to the ground.
Jordan hurried over to Patrick.
“Is he—dead?”
“Just out. I’ve got to get cuffs on him. We need to get to the dining room and kitchen. The guy won’t be out long.”
“Let’s do it,” she said, rising as Patrick rolled the man to get cuffs on him. She went to the arch that led into the dining room, pausing to peek in.
Another man of about the same age sat at the dining room table, frowning as he looked up from the paper he’d been reading. “Saul? What the hell?” he called out.
Saul, of course, couldn’t answer. Jordan looked at Patrick. She gave him a weak smile and made a knocking sound on the wall. The man at the table quicky stood, more perplexed than before, but apparently not worried enough to draw the gun stuck into a holster at his waistband.
Patrick grabbed a heavy vase, wrapping it in a throw blanket from the love seat, and found a position at the archway across from Jordan.
She made the noise again but muffled it a little.
The man walked through. Patrick caught him at the back of the head with the wrapped-up vase.
He went down with a grunt. The throw blanket kept the vase from shattering—or making much noise at all.
“Hey!” came a call from the kitchen.
They were both silent. Patrick dragged the man they had just downed to the side and cuffed him as well.
“He’s coming,” Jordan whispered.
Patrick was back with the vase and Jordan held her position.
“Move, move, get ahead of me!” They heard the man from the kitchen, presumably ordering his “cook.”
She let out a muffled sob.
“There had better not be anything wrong. I’ve got a gun to the back of your head!”
“Please!” came a whimper.
Patrick lifted a hand to Jordan. She flattened herself against the wall as Patrick backed away but stood in the middle of the parlor, where he could easily be seen.
A woman was pushed through the archway into the parlor. She was young, as most of the others had been. Pretty once, worn and too slim now, her features showing her misery, her soft brown hair long and tangled.
“What the hell?” the man who had pushed her through the doorway demanded as he stared at Patrick.
Patrick’s hands were on his hips; his weapon was holstered.
“Hey, time to let her go,” Patrick said with a shrug.
“Who the hell are you? And what the hell—”
His eyes fell on his co-jailers, both lying facedown and handcuffed.
“What the hell—”
He moved his gun, aiming it at Patrick rather than his now-sobbing captive.
Jordan moved.
There were things she had learned at the academy. Things about speed and precision with her Glock. She’d had a fine instructor, teaching them they wanted the cops and agents to come home, they were the good guys, so while they didn’t like killing criminals, when it was life-or-death for themselves, they needed to pull the trigger with speed and accuracy.
But she didn’t need to pull the trigger. She had speed and the element of absolute surprise because the man had seen Patrick—he hadn’t seen her.
And they needed everyone alive if they were ever going to find the truth behind the deepest bowels of the operation.
She moved like a bat out of hell, grabbing Patrick’s vase-weapon from the floor. She hurled the vase and struck the man on the head so hard he went down in a split second with only the tiniest whimper escaping him as he fell.
Patrick looked at her in surprise.
“Nice! You should have played for the majors.”
The young female hostage let out a sob that was almost a shriek. She turned in terror—first, to see Jordan, and then she backed away from them both in confusion.
“It’s all right. My name is Jordan. This is Patrick,” Jordan said quickly. “We’re with the government. We’re going to get you out of here.”
The young woman shook her head. “They’ve mixed us all up... There are other places. If anything happens at one—”
“We’ve been to the other two,” Patrick assured her gently. “Upstairs—who is still upstairs?”
“Just Molly and the children. But they’re locked in. They never let Molly out of her room; she hit one of them once. She has her son and my daughter. They let me out to cook.”
“That’s it? Just you—and Molly and two kids?” Patrick asked.
The young woman nodded.
“There used to be another girl. Another young woman, I guess. Very sweet, and so kind, but they came and took her away. They didn’t trust her. She was so smart, too. She was etching messages into tombstones, and they finally caught her. They said that she was going somewhere ‘special.’ She told me once the guys watching us weren’t even all that bad—they were scared, too. But...”
Jordan walked over and placed a gentle hand on her arm. “Do you know what her name was?” she asked quietly.
“Of course. Susie. Her name was Susie.”
Six
“Thank you for this,” Patrick said.
Jordan was tired. Exhausted, really. But she smiled, her head tilted back, her eyes closed, as he drove.
“You mean that I’m okay to prowl around an old cemetery late at night after the longest workday known to man?”
She cracked her eyes open. He was smiling. “Yeah,” he said simply.
“You forget, I care about Alfie and finding the truth as much as you do. It seems more and more likely the cases are related. The man called John Smith seems to be the same person orchestrating everything now.”
“And I’d been convinced it was Rory Ayers.”
She grimaced. “Maybe it was. We found the places where he was holding all the loved ones hostage. Maybe that’s it.”
“Maybe, but I was anxious to speak with him, to—”
“Read his mind?”
“I told you, it’s not automatic. Sometimes I know something in someone else’s head in a way that’s as clear as day, and sometimes not. Anyway, I do want to let Alfie know Susie had been a prisoner, and that they took her somewhere.”
“You think that’s going to make him happy?” she asked, wincing.
“When we tell him we won’t stop until we do find her.”
“Now I can read your mind. You were about to say ‘until we do find her—dead or alive.’”
“I think she’s alive.”
“But it sounded as if they moved her because she caused trouble. And we know they killed and buried a man in the old cemetery across the path. And while Alfie makes Susie sound sweet—a lost girl, running, just searching for a life and a direction—she might be pretty hardened by now. I don’t know. I hope we can find her. But where?” Jordan said.
“She’s out there. I know it. I believe it. And we will find her.”
They had reached the cemetery where Alfie lay with others who had served as officers.
“Hey, no admittance at night,” Jordan commented.
“But we’re agents on a case.”
Jordan laughed. “And how are we investigating the case right now in this cemetery?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just flash your badge and say that, for the moment, your movements are confidential,” he said. Then he shrugged. “I’m not really expecting anyone to stop us.”
“We’re hopping over a wall.”
“A little stone wall that’s about two feet high?”
“I told you. I care about Alfie and helping him, too. It’s just been a really long day, and I don’t particularly want to be arrested by the local police.” She winced and let out a sigh.
Patrick nodded. He’d been amused, but then his brow furrowed.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing. I just...”
“What? Patrick, please. Tell me.”
