Justified Means (Book One) (The Agency Files) (4 page)

“
You enjoy this job too much to be normal. My dad always said you had to be just a little crazy to be in the military or law enforcement. I never got it, but I think he’s right. You’re nuts.”

His expression never changed.
“It probably seems that way, yes.”

Curiosity drove
her to ask a question. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t make small talk, but Erika couldn’t resist. “Do you like your job?”

“
I’m good at it, it helps people, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

As sincere as his words sounded, he looked furious.
Whether it was because she’d asked or he answered, Erika couldn’t be sure. She also couldn’t resist another dig. “If you wanted to help people, you could have become a doctor or a teacher.”

“
Someone has to do the hard stuff, Erika. A doctor saves a life when they are broken by the wrath of man. I try to make his job easier or unnecessary so he can focus on helping a kid with cancer or a guy who decided to do an impromptu finger reduction while making a fort for his kids.”

Erika felt her face softening as he spoke until she remembered where she was.
“By kidnapping an innocent woman. Yeah, that makes loads of sense.” Frustrated, she rolled over on the bed, pulled the covers over her, and stared at the wall.

“
Goodnight, Erika. Try to sleep.”

All the anger, frustration, and fear welled up in her heart and spilled over into wracking sobs as she heard Keith slide the deadbolts into place
—the sounds taunting her with her prisoner status. A loud crash in the kitchen startled her. At the second crash, she forced herself to staunch the flow of tears. Her throat swelled and strained as she choked back the impulse to cry. She strained to listen, but her body betrayed her, and soon she fell into a fitful sleep.

Dread of locking Erika
in her room settled over Keith, smothering him with it. He hated this part of his job. The woman was terrified, and who could blame her? The longer she delayed in the bathroom, the tenser and more fidgety he became, until he thought that he’d go crazy. She was taking her time just to annoy him. A wry smile tried to make an appearance on his lips, but his angst stamped it out again. Keeping up her little games would probably keep her mentally aware and resilient.

“
You ready to chain me up in my dungeon?”

Inwardly, he winced at her tone.
Couldn’t she see how much he hated having to do it? He felt miserable as he shortened the chain. If she tried to get out of the window, she could hurt herself, but she was just desperate enough to try it. “Sleep well.” Even as he said it, his mind cringed. Right. Like that wasn’t a kick while she was down.

“
You enjoy your job too much to be normal.”

The dig hurt.
He did enjoy his job, but certain aspects, like the rare time he had to protect someone against his will, weren’t on his list of highlights. However, once the ordeal ended, Keith knew he’d be glad he could protect her, and he hoped she’d be able to forgive him—someday. His agency rarely employed abduction as a course of action. Some of his coworkers had been involved in similar things over the years, but Keith had only been on one other “protective abduction.”

That had been an easier case.
The man, elderly, had an irrepressible sense of humor, even when annoyed. He’d spent the four and a half weeks of involuntary sequestration working on a stand-up comedy routine, trying to get Keith to smile. He’d succeeded more often than Keith liked to admit. In the end, while still not happy about so much time chained to a cabin, Donald Bruner had been thankful to exchange a month of his life for the
rest
of his life.

“
At least Donald didn’t have to lie on the other side of that wall, terrified of the horrible things I might do to him,” Keith muttered, furious at the necessity for keeping even the most basic information from her. She’d handle things better if she knew. She’d understand if she knew, but that was the worst of it. Erika Polowski couldn’t know—not if they could help it.

All the frustration of the day and the lack of sleep the previous night welled up in Keith as he wiped out the cast-iron frying pan.
He’d never learned to be as detached as he appeared, and the frustration it brought welled up inside until he snapped. With more force than he intended, Keith slammed the frying pan down on the stove.

Five seconds of silence in the bedroom told him he
’d scared her. Great. As if the poor woman weren’t terrified enough, he had to make it worse. He grabbed the Dutch oven from the drying rack, opened the oven door, shoved it in, and jumped when the door slammed shut with a crash that was almost as loud as his abuse of the frying pan. This time, the silence hovered over the cabin like a suffocating blanket.

Anxious to escape the stifling atmosphere, Keith grabbed the gun from the counter, double-checked the safety, and then slid it into the holster but didn
’t strap down the cover. The night breeze, brisk and working up to a full-blown storm, seemed to blow the angst from his heart. “Lord, she doesn’t even have You to get her through this. How do people stand it?”

Mark had provided a very thorough dossier on Erika Polowski
. People who had nothing to hide tended to be very open about themselves—especially in the age of electronic information. Between her Blog, her Facebook page—why didn’t people use their privacy settings more often—and her posts on several message boards, he had a fair idea of her political, religious, and ideological positions on most things. Jesus was nothing more than a euphemism for “my goodness” to her. Her politics leaned strongly in the liberal camp, and she had a soft spot for lost causes. She’d fight to save the cockroach if by some miracle the things neared extinction.

A shiver washed over him.
Instinctively, his eyes scanned the trees, and he patrolled the perimeter of the cabin as a precaution. Nervous, he pulled the gun from its holster and rested his thumb on the safety. Was it the cold? Did he sense something? Did something enter his peripheral vision? Why the heightened awareness now? Training kicked in as he kept to the shadows and strained to see something—anything—in the shadowy darkness just a few yards from him.

He felt ridiculous.
It was the cold, surely. They hadn’t been there long enough for anyone to have a clue where to find them, but he had to be sure. His job was to protect Erika, and ignoring anything, no matter how improbable, could get her killed. At the front door, he slipped inside, holstered his gun, and ran for his night-vision binoculars. Thermal imaging was amazing stuff, especially with a blanket of fog settling in around them.

Working counter-clockwise, Keith crept from window to window, and even through the glass blocks of the bathroom, until he was forced to decide what to do about Erika
’s room. If he went in, he’d scare her. If he went outside without checking things out from her room, he’d risk himself, and subsequently, her. Remembering her terrified face when he stretched the duct tape over her mouth sent him back toward the front door. He couldn’t do it.

Holding the binoculars in one hand and his gun in the other, Keith crept from the house and began his sweep around the structure once more.
Nothing. A glance at Erika’s car reminded him that someone could hide behind a tire. If he stepped away from the cabin, he’d be even more vulnerable, but he had to check. A drawback to his job.

With another prayer for Erika
’s safety on his lips, Keith raced to the trunk, gun drawn, safety off, and took one last deep breath before he stepped around the bumper to the other side of the car. Empty. A rush of air escaped his lungs as he relaxed. All his imagination. He’d take one last sweep, just to be sure, and then get some sleep. Erika wouldn’t be happy if she was forced to use the potty-bucket.

As he rounded the corner of the house, a movement near the tree line to his right sent him diving behind the propane tank.
“Not exactly a comforting place to take cover, Auger,” he muttered to himself as he tried to peer around it with the binoculars.

There it was again.
Just a flash and then nothing. He waited. Whatever was there was deliberately hiding. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his heart pounded in his chest as he waited, each second passing slower than a minute to his adrenaline-riddled body. Just as he thought he’d go insane with the wait, he dropped the binoculars, holstered his gun, and marched back into the house, disgusted.

“
Of all the stupid rookie things to do, that has to be the worst. ‘Yeah, Mark, I spent half an hour protecting her from a ferocious raccoon.’ I can hear it now.”

Keith set the gun back on the counter and then went to put the binoculars back in his duffel.
Erika’s dossier lay tucked beneath his spare jeans and t-shirts. Grabbing it and another pair of socks, he made a cup of cocoa and prepared to relax for a few minutes to let the adrenaline settle before he tried to sleep.

Spread out on the couch, he opened the folder and stared at the photo.
Like most people, Erika Polowski’s driver’s license photo did not flatter her. She still wore her hair in the same short, dark, spiky style—the style that had required Karen to buy a wig for the extraction—but it was much more attractive in person than on the photo before him. An attempt to avoid the mug shot-look gave her face a grimace that made her look immature and bad-tempered, and her eyes, though the license claimed they were green, looked inky black in the photo.

He pulled a small manila envelope and shook out a small stack of photos taken of her at work, the grocery store, and a local bar.
Keith paused at one picture of her laughing at something a man with her said. Just from that picture, he could tell she was flirting. The dossier said no boyfriend, but the pictures were only a couple of weeks old at most. Had that changed?

Another picture, this one of her talking with an elderly customer, made him smile.
As he flipped through the stack, he realized that in nearly every one, she was smiling. Frustrated, he shoved the photos back in the envelope. How long would it be before she’d feel like smiling again?

Once again, his eyes scanned the list for anything he
’d be able to use to make her feel more comfortable. A B.S. in Anthropology didn’t give her many job opportunities, so she’d taken the job managing a popular café and had doubled the business. She was popular with the customers and played softball during the season.

Twenty-six years old, five foot five inches tall with perfect eyesight and two upper dental implants as a result of one of those softball games.
Six months out of the year, she lived at home with her parents, presumably saving to buy her own house, and the other six months were spent house sitting for a woman who spent the winter in Australia to enjoy their summer season. She’d been in Helen Franklin’s house when they took her.

He sighed.
There was nothing. Erika was an avid political activist—a champion for justice for everything from trying to eradicate the death penalty in all fifty states to preserving the natural habitat of the Mojave ground squirrel in California. “Seriously, Erika? A squirrel?”

Keith snapped the folder shut and dragged himself from the couch.
Shoving the dossier under his clothes again, he grabbed his toothbrush and went to brush his teeth. His nighttime “ablutions,” as his grandma always called it, took a fraction of the time Erika’s had. “Just like a woman. Even trying to be obnoxious, she used the bathroom to do it.”

That thought made him smile again.
The girl had spunk. He had to give her that. He rinsed his toothbrush, dried it, and laid it on the sink, snapping the light off as he left the room. Seconds later, he flipped the switch again, grabbed the toothbrush, and left the room again. Leaving his toothbrush for her to contaminate would be something she could not resist.

He paused at her door, listening.
Nothing—not a single sound emanated from the room. He hoped that was good. A roll away cot pulled from the closet, a pillow, and a sleeping bag made up his bed. His own yawn startled him. “Ok, Lord. Things are ok, so far. Let’s just get through this first night, ok?”

Keith flew from the cot, tripping over his own feet, and grabbed his gun, swinging it in an arc as he tried to discover the source of the pounding. Relief washed over him as he realized it was just Erika. Maybe he’d been wrong. His confidence that he could protect her without needing someone to take watch while he slept almost seemed misplaced as he stumbled toward her bedroom. If someone had entered the house, he’d be dead. Erika would be dead.