Authors: Dean Murray
"Okay,
that's good enough for me. Good luck on the call and good luck
tonight if I don't talk to you before then."
Taggart
knocked on my door and then slowly opened it. "Adri, you asked
me to make sure you were up in time to make your call."
"Thanks,
Taggart. I'm just about to make it right now. Any last words of
advice before I call her?"
"Don't
let the pendulum swing too far towards the person you're talking to.
Your goal is first to stall and then second to try to arrange a meet
where we have a chance of turning the tables on them. Simply throwing
yourself into their mercy will do nothing but get all four of you
killed. I've never yet met a vampire with anything remotely
resembling a sense of honor."
"Stall
first?"
"Yes.
I put them not in order of importance, but rather in order of what I
think we'll actually be able to accomplish."
It
was a depressing analysis, but that didn't mean it wasn't right. I
frowned and then nodded. "Okay, here goes."
Taggart
held up a hand. "I know that we are nearly out of time, but
Isaac was planning on trying to run a trace. Give me just a second to
text him and confirm that he's ready."
Somewhere
along the way the message had burned itself into my mind. I had no
problems remembering the sequence of numbers that I needed to dial. I
waited until Taggart's phone vibrated and he nodded at me before
inputting the phone number and pressing the dial button on my screen.
"Hello?"
That
voice was likewise burned into my mind and I felt an instant surge of
hate flash through me. "This is Adri; I believe that you have
several someones who belong to me."
"Adri,
I'm very glad that you called me back. I was just debating which of
your family members would be the first to lose a finger."
"Look,
I get it. You've got my family and you're a ruthless individual who
will hurt them if I don't do exactly what you say. Why don't you just
get to the point and tell me where you want me to meet you."
Taggart
looked unhappy and he'd started making stretching gestures at me, so
apparently I wasn't supposed to be moving the conversation along that
quickly.
"You're
refreshingly unafraid for someone who knows at least part of who and
what I am. I think I'm going to enjoy our time together even more
than I expected."
"You're
a vampire, not some kind of demigod. You may be a nasty piece of
work, but I've learned a lot about dealing with nasty over the last
few weeks. As for your heavy-handed hints that you're going to break
me by using torture, you can stop trying so hard. I heard almost
exactly the same spiel out of Pamela before I killed her."
"I
think you're straying into the territory of useless posturing now,
Adri. I'm equally aware of the fact that you killed Pamela, but I
think you'll find that Pamela was hardly comparable to me in any form
or fashion."
"Whatever.
Tell me where you want this handoff to go down so I can decide
whether I'm going to go through with this."
"You
don't really expect me to believe that you're going to abandon your
own flesh and blood to my tender mercies, do you?"
By
that point I was shaking, partly in fear and partly in rage, but
somehow I managed to keep all of that out of my voice.
"Here's
the thing, you bottom-feeding parasite. I know you're not planning on
giving my family up. This isn't a trade and we both know it. You're
just hoping that you can use my family to lure me out of hiding so
you can grab me, while I'm hoping to use myself as bait to ambush you
and your crew so I can climb over your dead bodies along the way to
saving my family. This is a game of Russian roulette, and neither of
us is going to let the other lure them into an
obvious
ambush."
"I
prefer to think of it more in terms of something with less pure
chance involved, but I won't argue with you. That being the case, how
would you like to proceed?"
"You
name a town, and once I've had a chance to get there and get the lie
of the land I'll give you a two-hour window in which to name the
location."
"Nice
try, child, but I'm not going to give you my location and unlimited
time to come hunt for me. I've done quite well for myself up until
this point without access to your apparently considerable talents, so
I'm actually quite content to drain your family dry and move on
without you.
"Here
is how we will proceed. You will return to your home and I will call
you tomorrow morning with the location of the meet. You will have two
hours in which to arrive at the location or you'll never see your
family alive again."
I
forced my response out through clenched teeth. "That isn't
enough time for me to get home."
There
was a slight pause as though she was consulting with someone and then
she chuckled. "I'm rather intrigued by the unorthodox method
your hacker has taken to mask your presence. It appears that you're
somewhere around Wyoming, so you could make it here in twenty-four
hours if you really tried, but I'm willing to be generous. You have
until tomorrow night to get to your home and wait for my call. These
things always go better when both parties understand where the true
balance of power lies."
Adriana Paige
Eastbound on I-80
Southern Nebraska
To say that I
was pissed would have been like saying that the North Pole
occasionally got a little chilly. Given how sensitive his hearing
was, Taggart had heard both sides of the exchange, so there wasn't
any reason for us to speak.
I grabbed some
clothes and disappeared into my bathroom as Taggart grabbed my travel
bag and headed towards the garage. It took me less than ten minutes
to shower, dress and pull on the black leather shoulder holster for
my gun that I'd found in the armory. Once my weapon was properly
situated, I slipped on a loose button-up shirt and left my room. I
wasn't going to win any fashion awards with what I was wearing, but
it was the most comfortable way to wear my gun and there wasn't any
way I was going back home without some kind of equalizer.
I made a quick
trip up to the convenience store to grab enough munchies to tide me
over until we made our first pit stop and then met up with Taggart
who was just coming back to tell me that our vehicle was all packed
up and ready to go.
Less than
twenty minutes after I ended my call with the vampire, the bunker and
store were both locked up and we were on the road. Initially I
thought that being in motion would help distract me from what had
just happened, but all it did was give me plenty of time to stew.
I mustered up
an occasional smile for Taggart and made just enough small talk to
make sure that he knew I wasn't mad at him, but mostly the next half
hour just consisted of me wishing that I hadn't made such a colossal
mess of everything. If it would have just been up to me, I would have
probably kept going like that until we stopped for the evening.
Luckily Taggart
was keeping a much clearer perspective about things than I was.
"Adri, I know you're unhappy right now, but we need to talk—for
the good of the mission."
It had been a
while since I'd been able to stay mad at Taggart, but even if I'd
been inclined that way, his words would have pulled me up short. He
was right, we needed to bring Isaac up to speed on everything we
knew. First things first though, I needed to own up to just how
poorly I'd done.
"You're
right, Taggart. I'm sorry. First I made a complete mess of the phone
call with that…parasite, and then I completely lost sight of
the bigger picture."
"I don't
think that you did a poor job just now, Adri. I think you were in a
very tough position against someone who is convinced they hold all of
the cards. Those are never pleasant negotiations. The key thing is
that we have some time still to look for your family and you didn't
lay all of our cards on the table. She doesn't know that we already
knew they were two hours from Minneapolis, she doesn't know that we
already have a team of people in place in the area, and she doesn't
know that you and I are going to try to assassinate her tonight. I
would count it as a win, all things considered."
I opened my
mouth to tell him that there wasn't any need to lie to me, but he
gave me a look that I knew meant that he thought I was about to say
something immature and unnecessary. Usually when he shot me that look
he was right, so I stopped long enough for him to continue.
"The
important thing is that we confer with Isaac and see how far he was
able to make it with his trace."
"Okay,
I'll stop beating myself up about everything until at least after we
find out how things went on his end."
"Very
good. Your phone is powered off, I assume?"
"No, but
Isaac's program is still running on it so it shouldn't be pinging off
of any towers. I get your point though that it's probably
compromised. I'll power it down just to make sure. Can I use your
phone to call Isaac?"
Taggart handed
me his phone without taking his eyes off of the road and Isaac picked
up on the first ring.
"It wasn't
good, Taggart. Whoever this group is they have NSA-level encryption
and signal scrambling."
"Hey,
Isaac, I'm here too. I take it that means that you didn't manage to
track them down?"
"I'm
sorry, Adri, I didn't even come close. This was way beyond anything I
would have been expecting out of, well, anyone really. I mean
seriously, some of the calls out of Langley are less secure than the
line she just used to call you. You would have had to keep her
talking for half an hour for me to even begin to track her signal
down, and even then it wouldn't have mattered because she would have
been knocking on our front door way before that happened."
"What do
you mean?"
"I mean
she tracked your signal back to the cell tower you were pinging off
of and then shut that tower down in an effort to triangulate you. If
I'd been running anything other than the setup I was they would have
known exactly where the bunker was rather than just localizing it
down to a thousand-square-mile area, but that's not even the most
impressive part.
"At the
same time her people were doing that, they were also tracing back my
attempt at tracing her. I took a few extra precautions before I
started trying to localize her, and they still almost burned me. I
routed myself through six different college campuses and it didn't
even slow them down. They compromised my first three shells in the
first twenty seconds and only the fact that the next two boxes are
uncommonly hard to crack gave me time to set a spoof. I made it look
like my laptop was just another compromised box, by using the
signal…"
"I'm sorry
to rain on your techno-hacker muscle-flexing, but you lost me about
ten seconds ago. Basically they were bad news and you think they
didn't manage to track you down?"
"Yeah, but
not just bad news. Seriously there are governments that aren't this
good, and I'm not just talking about banana republics either."
I wanted to
scream at the situation we were in, but there wasn't any way to do
that without making Isaac feel like I was mad at him.
"Okay, so
the phone call was a bust. What about the moving vans?"
"Nothing
so far. I've got my people dangerously spread out right now looking
at the most likely towns, but so far all of the vampire scent trails
we've turned up haven't led back to anywhere important. We all swung
by your house when we first got here and poked around a little so
that everyone would know who they were trying to scent-track."
Taggart looked
at me out of the corner of his eye. "Were you able to get
anything else helpful out of your sister and mother, Adri?"
"Maybe,
but I don't know if it will be enough. My mom was a total bust, but
Cindi has been getting 'feelings' lately that are surprisingly
accurate. I think that she might have some kind of ability of her own
that she hasn't fully tapped into yet. She thinks that they headed
mostly north and maybe a little east, and that they are inside some
kind of big building with a lot of empty space in the center and
offices or some other kind of smaller rooms along the edge of the
open space."
"So she
didn't see anything when they took her inside? That's risky, Adri.
The area to the north of the city is the area that has the least
amount of traffic based on what I was able to pull out of the truck
rental company's system. If we move everyone up north and it turns
out her feelings are nothing more than feelings, then we'll never
find your family. Are you sure that's what you want to do?"
Part of me
still wanted to be pissed at everything about the situation, but I
wasn't, not really. It was amazing the difference having a plan made
in your outlook. Cindi's potential ability had given me one last
idea, one last way of potentially taking the vampires by surprise in
case I wasn't able to pull the vampires into my dream one at a time.
"Please
start moving our people north for now, Isaac. Don't give up on all of
the other leads that you have managed to turn up, but I think this is
a chance we need to start looking into. Before that though, I have
one other favor I'm hoping you'll do for me."
"What's that, Adri?"
"How do you feel about kidnapping someone?"
Adriana Paige
Eastbound on I-80
Southern Nebraska
Isaac had been
understandably wary until I'd finished explaining my plan to him, at
which time he agreed to the plan in principle—assuming of
course that I could get Tristan to play along. Getting Tristan to
agree turned out to be the easiest part of the whole process.