Hector was good. He managed to keep the knife at her wrist without it looking awkward. They walked to the door and Isabel kept her gaze down, at the floor. A sign she desperately hoped Joe would interpret as stay away!
Hector had already cost her everyone she loved. Mother, father, brothers. Aunts, uncles, cousins. She wasn’t going to give him Joe, too. Not sweet, brave Joe. She’d rather die herself.
It was dark inside the restaurant and outside, too. No lights at all. If Joe was coming out, he was coming out blind. He’d shown her night vision and she knew that whoever was out there with a sniper rifle could see just fine, and they were blind.
Whatever Hector’s plan was, though, Joe and his guys were smarter.
They were crossing the threshold of the restaurant, Hector pushing open the door into the cold night. Behind her, restaurant patrons were murmuring. She knew her team would be scrambling to deal with the situation.
“Forget about anyone coming after you,” Hector said, bending toward her. An uncle out with his beloved niece. “I just set off a limited EMP. That same EMP that killed video cameras and cell phones and any tracking devices you might have on you? It also killed any vehicles with electric circuitry. But I have acquired a vehicle that doesn’t have electronic circuitry. Ah, here we are.”
A dilapidated van screeched into the driveway, backed up. The rear doors opened and before Isabel could react, she was shoved inside and Hector climbed up next to her.
The doors were pulled shut and she bounced against the hard steel wall as the van took a corner and sped away.
Hector was wrapping something soft around her wrists in a figure eight. He knotted the ends and let her go. She tried to free herself but they were like handcuffs, only soft.
The van was moving fast. Every few minutes the driver took a sharp turn. She was lost in minutes.
Hector was looking out the back window with binoculars. “Don’t even think of trying to get away, my dear.” He put the binoculars down and spoke to the driver. “Nobody following us. We’re clear.”
She was trapped in a van with a man who wanted to kill her. Who had killed her entire family. Nobody knew where she was and no one could find her.
Hector was going to win this.
* * *
“Fuck!” Joe wanted to scream but he knew he couldn’t. Silence on an op had been beaten into him. He was blind. And deaf, he discovered as he tapped his earbud and got a whole lot of nothing. Complete silence. He couldn’t go running toward Isabel in the restaurant, that would tip Blake off.
What was happening out there?
Joe had to find out the old-fashioned way. By looking. Actual looking with his actual eyes because sure as fuck his electronic eyes were shot to hell.
He peered around a corner, trying to find Isabel and Blake in the sudden gloom in the restaurant. People were standing up, having patiently waited for the lights to come on. Now that they weren’t, they were getting agitated.
With the restaurant-goers milling around he couldn’t see the table at the front windows where Isabel sat. He moved through the diners as quickly and unobtrusively as he could, head on a swivel and as he moved toward the windows he saw Isabel and Blake outside. Who knew what he’d done to convince her to go with him but the fucker was wrong if he thought he was going to be able to kidnap Isabel.
In a fury, Joe took off, but in the darkness, a couple stumbled in his way and by the time he’d shoved them aside, Isabel was gone. Gone. In an old van with mud on the license plate, red brake lights winking as it took a corner. It had come racing to the entrance and in a second, Blake had pushed Isabel in then climbed in after her.
He hadn’t had a straight shot otherwise he’d have killed the fucker.
Joe raced to the back where the crew was.
“She’s gone!” he shouted.
Felicity slammed her computer shut. “Damn thing is fried. All comms are down. Must have been some kind of limited EMP. If he killed my computer, he’s going to be sorry.”
Metal and Jacko ran in, grim-faced, carrying their rifles. “Our vehicles won’t start,” Jacko growled.
Joe punched a wall. “Contact Bud Morrison! Get a description of that van out in a BOLO!”
Jacko’s friend Chuck, the owner of the restaurant, held up his hands. “Guys, sorry. The cells are fried and I don’t have a landline. The nearest public pay phone is a mile away. East to Stone Avenue. We’re completely cut off here. And I gotta get out there and deal with the customers.”
Joe was clenching his jaws so hard it hurt. Even running, it would take them minutes—minutes they didn’t have—to get to the public pay phones. By then Blake would be long gone. Joe had no doubt that they’d be finding Isabel’s dead body somewhere far away, on some roadside, tumbled down a remote hillside or fished out of the river.
He’d never felt so fucking frustrated. On any op there was always something you could do. But now? Any step could be wrong, waste precious time. It scared the hell out of him.
For the very first time since he signed up to be a warrior, he didn’t know what to do.
Metal and Jacko and Nick were looking at him, all three of them with their useless cells in hand. Felicity was looking at him, too, fingers touching the closed cover of her useless laptop.
Time was rushing by like a flood, Isabel was getting farther and farther from him with every passing second and he didn’t know what the fuck to do!
A vehicle slewed to a stop outside the back room, in the loading area, spewing gravel. It was ancient—with more primer than paint, two dented fenders. A jalopy.
A man got out, tall, with dirty blond dreadlocks. He was moving fast and Joe drew his weapon. The man had an athlete’s body but he looked like a homeless person, clothes rags, boots ancient. Hands and face grimy with dirt. And with a lump on his hip under the filthy long overcoat.
Was he sent by Blake?
“Hold it right there! Hands up!” Joe held his Glock two-handed at chest level. If this guy was sent by Blake he was going to kill him where he stood, homeless or not. The guy wasn’t raising his hands. “There are two snipers behind me. You reach for your weapon you’re a dead man.”
The man was frowning. “Goddammit, we don’t have time for this shit! You let them take Isabel! She’s getting farther from us every damned second.”
Joe lowered his weapon.
The bum glared at Joe. “Name’s Jack Delvaux. I’m Isabel’s brother and you’ve been talking to me on the computer. Blake must have used a miniature, controlled-pulse EMP so whatever tags you put on Isabel are useless. But I’ve got a hardened tag on that fucker Blake, so you and your friends hop in, we’re going after the son of a bitch.”
* * *
“You’re never going to get away with this.” Isabel kept her voice steady as she rode in the back of the van on a bench set along the side. Hector had been leaning forward conferring with the driver. She couldn’t hear what they were saying over the loud engine noise of the ancient vehicle.
Hector’s eyebrows rose as he looked back at her. “Oh, but I am going to get away with it. As I told you, I’m in Washington, DC, right now.” He sat back down next to her. “You’ve been rich all your life so you should know this. Money can buy a lot of things, a lot of people.”
“And you’ve made plenty of money,” she spat.
“Plenty, yes. With more to come. But that won’t concern you, my dear, because you’ll have taken your own life. Poor, broken Isabel checked into a cheap motel and took enough pills to kill a horse.”
She tried to still her hammering heart. He sounded so certain, so matter of fact. But he couldn’t fake her suicide, could he? “People know I’m with you.”
Blake shook his head. “People know you’re with someone. Maybe an old lover, maybe the guy who filled your prescriptions for you. All anyone knows—if they even saw it in the dark—is that you willingly went with someone and drove away. No one could possibly know it’s me. And I put out a small electromagnetic pulse and anything with a chip is fried. My hat—” he tipped the brim of the fedora, dark eyes sardonic, “—has infrared lights in the brim. In case the cameras caught my face for one second before everything was switched off, all theyd get was a glow. I wore gloves. Even if someone saw me all they could say was that they saw a man in a black coat, hat, dark glasses and a scarf over the bottom half of his face. No one could possibly recognize me.