Beth mouthed, “I love you,” to her children as tears streamed down her face, but she didn’t think either of them saw. She wept and cried like a wounded animal. She had failed her children. If they died, she was responsible.
“Wait! Wait!” Beth screamed. “I’ll tell you where to find the Bull! I know where it is!”
“You’re lying,” Andreyev replied.
“I’m not! I’ll tell you everything I know! Just let my children go!”
“Tell me then!” he yelled.
“It’s in our house,” Beth whimpered. “The Bull is in our house.”
“Liar! We have searched it.” Andreyev kept his eyes trained on her. “Kill them.”
She watched in horror as two index fingers tightened around the triggers. She screamed as they were drawn back to firing points. Finally, she shut her eyes. She couldn’t watch. She waiting for the inevitable.
Nothing happened.
She opened her eyes to see the shooters raise their pistols. The one holding Danny aimed his gun at Beth and pulled the trigger. There was a dull click. The gun wasn’t loaded.
She screamed and the children broke into hysterical crying.
“She doesn’t know anything,” Andreyev said. “Cut her down. She’s no use to us dead.”
Andreyev stalked close to Beth as the man holding Danny handed the boy to his accomplice. Beth ignored Andreyev and kept her eyes on her children. She would never forgive these people for what they’d done.
“You might not have the answers we need, but you’re still of use,” Andreyev said. “Your husband survived.”
Beth couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Was this another game? Some kind of cruel torture?
“You are our leverage,” Andreyev said. “You and your children.”
The masked man who’d held Danny produced a hunting knife from behind his back and stood beside Beth to cut her bonds. She cried as she fell to the floor.
Finally released, Maria and Danny ran over and threw their arms around her.
Andreyev said something in Russian and the two masked men followed him out of the barn.
Beth’s arms burned with pain. There was little strength in them, but she didn’t care. She hugged her children to her as tightly as she possibly could, relishing every moment and praying this wasn’t some kind of dream.
Chapter 74
We were on our way to Manhattan when the satellite phone rang. Mo-bot had it connected to her computer and was interrogating its registry.
She handed me the phone, but kept it plugged into her machine.
“Hello?” I said when I answered.
“Mr. Morgan?”
I recognized Andreyev’s voice immediately.
“Yes.”
“You said the pilot survived. Is he still with you?”
“Yeah, he’s with me.”
“Then we might be able to make a trade,” Andreyev said. “The woman and children for the pilot.”
“I’ll have to check. Can I reach you on this number?”
I looked at Mo-bot and signaled to my watch. She nodded and indicated she’d had enough time to run a trace.
“Of course,” Andreyev replied.
“I’ll call you when I have an answer.”
I hung up and turned to Floyd.
“He’s offering Beth, Danny and Maria in exchange for you.”
“We do it,” Floyd said immediately. “It’s not even in question.”
“I know this is going to be hard for you to hear,” I replied. “But I think it’s a bad idea. He’ll take you and keep Beth and the children as leverage. Most likely kill you all when he has whatever it is he wants.”
“We can stop that happening,” Floyd countered. “Hold him to his deal. Or lure him out and take them.”
I frowned. Both those suggestions were extremely high-risk.
“Mo?” I asked.
She shook her head. “He’s routing the call through a number of networks. It’s impossible to trace.”
I looked at Justine, who was focused on the snow-flanked highway. She glanced over and shrugged.
“We make the trade,” Floyd said firmly.
I didn’t see what other options we had and was about to reply when I saw a familiar expression cross Mo-bot’s face. The cat most definitely had got the cream.
“There is another way,” she said. “I’ve found an old number on the phone. A couple incoming calls made two weeks ago from the same cell tower near the Pentagon we found when we tracked Andreyev’s call. I think this number might belong to our mole in the Department of Defense.”
Chapter 75
“Goodnight, sir,” the guard at the desk said, before pressing the button that opened the outer door to the Rotary Entrance.
A blast of cold air hit Rick Ferguson as he left the Pentagon and headed for the parking lot. He hurried along the raised walkway and down the stone steps that led to the premier tier of spaces, where the senior brass parked. He was a rung down the ladder, which meant he had to walk through the lot, braving the bitter night. He jogged across North Rotary Road, his breath rising in little clouds before dissipating into the clear sky. The stars shimmered brightly in the frozen air. Rick clapped his gloved hands and picked up his pace. This was not a night for tarrying. He passed a few more senior staff cars and finally made it to his spot beneath one of the street lamps.
He opened the driver’s door, grabbed his scraper and removed an inch of crusted snow from the windshield of his late-model Range Rover Sport. He brushed loose snow off his gloves, replaced the scraper in the side pocket and climbed into the driver’s seat. He’d had the car a little over six months and it still gave him a buzz of pleasure to see it parked in the driveway in the morning. He’d told nosy Nancys and Normans at work that Ellie’s mother had gifted them some money, but the truth was a little more complicated.
He settled back in his cream leather seat and reversed out of his space, then drove toward the gate. The guard in the gatehouse checked his license plate and ran an ID check on him before lowering the cheese-wedge barrier that was designed to keep out intruders. Rick gave a friendly nod and wave to the guard, before driving on. He turned left onto Washington Boulevard and headed for the Memorial Highway.
“Call home,” he said.
“Calling home,” his in-car assistant said, and a moment later Ellie came on the line.
“Hello?”
“Hey, hon, it’s me.”
“How was your day?” she asked.
The most banal of all questions, asked by billions of spouses every single day. Rick had complained once and regretted it.
“What are our lives worth to each other if we don’t share them?” Ellie had asked, along with other emotive comments in that vein.
So he knew it was easier to just answer with his now habitual, “Oh, you know, same old, same old.”
“I hear you,” Ellie replied.
It was vacuous and a total waste of oxygen, but it gave her comfort for some reason.
“Tara gave me nothing but trouble today, and when I...” she began to drone.
“Honey, I’m about to hit the black spot,” Rick said.
There was no black spot. It was a convenient invention that spared him from listening to the mundanities of her day.
“I just wanted to know if you wanted me to pick anything up?”
“No, we’re good,” she replied. “I made spaghetti and meatballs.”
He endured Ellie’s meatballs at least once a week and was getting tired of them. They were bland and dry, but if he ever told her that, they’d need to have another “chat,” so it was easier to play nice.
“Yum,” he lied. “And you can tell me all about what Tara did when I get home.”