Alive.
The alternative to that one word was too terrible to think about.
Jennings lived alone in a small row house in a seedy part of Baltimore, very urban, very working class. The snatch would be the hardest part. To pull that off without alerting the neighbors could be a huge feat on its own. If it went wrong, and someone called the police, her FBI credentials would be of no help. In fact, they might even prove to be a burden. For the plan to work—for it to get past the first step—stealth would be the key. That meant no shots fired, which was easier said than done when you were invading a private residence with guns drawn and safeties off.
It was just a little after midnight when Irene and her two team members glided their blacked-out black van into position in front of Jennings’s row house.
“How sure are you that this is the address?” Jonathan asked.
Irene had spent at least thirty hours of her life combing through this place during the Harrelson case and its aftermath. “One hundred percent,” she said.
“Can you go a little higher?” Boxers asked from the driver’s seat. Jonathan was riding shotgun while Irene occupied the only row of seats behind the front buckets.
“The more pertinent question is whether he’s home,” Irene offered. “On that I have no idea.”
“I can help there,” Jonathan said. He pointed through the windshield. “See that phone booth?” he asked.
It took her a few seconds, but then she got it. It wasn’t a booth so much as it was a platform connected to the side of a building. “Yes.”
“You still have his number?” It was part of the planning research.
“I do.” Irene was already sliding the side door open. Could it really be this simple?
Even at this late hour, the air felt heavy with humidity as Irene walked to the phone. She did her best to ignore the weight and additional heat of her body armor, focusing her mind on the protection it would provide if this turned into a shooting war. When she arrived at the phone, she lifted the receiver and slipped a quarter into the slot. She dialed the 410 area code and number. At this hour, if the line were answered at all, she expected that it would be picked up after at least three or four rings. She was startled, then, when she heard the click after the first ring.
“Hello?”
She’d recognize that voice out of a crowd of ten thousand people.
“Can I speak to Pamela?” She’d dropped her voice a quarter octave and feigned a Southern accent.
A pause.
Oh, shit, he suspects something!
“Who?”
“Pamela,” Irene repeated.
“Who is this?”
She heard suspicion in his voice, maybe a note of panic. “Is this four one oh . . .” She repeated the phone number she’d called with a middle digit transposed.
“Do you know what time it is?” Jennings snapped. “You’ve got a wrong number.”
Click.
Irene closed her eyes and released a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.
Thank God.
She’d gotten away with it. As she walked back to the van, she gestured with two thumbs up, and the doors opened right away.
“He’s there,” Irene said as she came within earshot. She pulled a stocking cap out of her pocket, fiddled with it till she found the front, and pulled it onto the top of her head.
Neither man said a word, but their body language showed that they were ready for whatever lay ahead. As he slid the door to the van closed, Jonathan handed Irene a Heckler and Koch MP-5 machine pistol. “You’ve used one of these, right?” he asked.
The nine-millimeter mini-assault rifle was a standard armament for the Hostage Rescue Team, but she’d never been particularly enamored of it. Chambered in nine millimeter, the weapon presented a rapid rate of fire, but the small round had a bad record for knock-down capability.
“I’ve used them, yes,” Irene said. She slipped the combat sling over her shoulder.
“If it comes down to a shoot-out,” Jonathan said, “just keep your front sight on the center of mass. If you cut out the core, the rest of the bad guy will fall with it.”
Irene felt a swell of indignant anger. She neither needed nor appreciated marksmanship lessons from an Army grunt.
Irene noted that Jonathan carried a Colt 1911 .45 on his hip, cocked and locked, and that Boxers carried what looked like a derringer against his size, but that she in fact knew to be a standard military-issue Beretta nine-millimeter. They’d given her a choice of sidearm, and she’d chosen a nine-millimeter SIG-Sauer P228 just like the one she trained with every week on the FBI range. Familiarity was key when it came to shooting straight, but she was grateful not to have to worry about ballistics tracing back to her own weapon if someone ended up getting shot.
As she approached the front door to the row house, Irene noted that Jennings had replaced the locks that had been busted up in the original raid, but that otherwise, the façade looked just as worn and weathered as it always had.
“We’re all good on the plan, right?” Jonathan whispered. He pulled the front of his own stocking cap to unfurl the mask that would cover everything except his eyes and his mouth. “There’s nothing subtle about it. We crash in, we snatch the son of a bitch, bag him and bind him, and get the hell out. Time inside shouldn’t be more than a minute.” He looked at Irene. “Big Guy and I have worked a lot together in the past, so we’re going to handle the rough stuff, okay? Rattler, you provide eyes and cover. Yes?”
Irene nodded and pulled her own face mask into place. If a car had been cruising by, the driver would no doubt have been terrified by what he saw. “Yes,” she said. Because of the need for anonymity, Jonathan had given her the code name Rattler. His own was Scorpion, and Boxers’ was Big Guy.
“Good. Let’s go.” He turned to his big friend. “Your turn,” he said.
Irene hadn’t noticed the three-foot thirty-five-pound cylindrical steel battering ram that Boxers carried in his other hand, or that he had likewise blanked out his face. Jonathan stepped aside to leave room while the big man gripped the handles at the front and rear of the ram, squared off perpendicular to the door, and then like a human Da Vinci’s Cradle, swung the plug of steel in a giant underhand arc that contacted the door right at the sweet spot, shattering those shiny new locks and propelling what was left of the splintered door inward on its hinges till it slammed against the wall.
Jonathan squirted through the opening first, followed by Boxers, and together, they streamed up the stairs to the bedroom level, leaving Irene to push the door closed and monitor the first floor, which, in the dim light that streamed in from the street, looked like it might have been burgled. Stuff was strewn everywhere, on the floor, draped over what little furniture there was. When she noticed that the detritus included multiple pizza boxes, complete with leftover pizza still inside, she knew that it was just Jennings being true to form.
Jonathan had been right when he’d warned that there would be nothing subtle about the approach. They sounded like a wrecking crew on the second floor, their heavy footsteps combining with crashing furniture and doors to create a cacophony that rattled the whole structure. Surely, given the age of these homes and the thinness of the walls, they were awakening the neighbors.
But where was the shouting to get down and show hands? Where were the protests from Jennings to be left alone?
He’s down here.
The thought arrived fully formed and devoid of doubt. He’d answered the phone quickly, hadn’t he? That meant he wasn’t yet asleep. It made perfect sense, then, that he would be on the first floor, not on the second. Or maybe the basement.
Shit.
She reached first for the MP5, but then let it go and drew her SIG. She’d fired thousands of rounds through the carbine, but tens of thousands of rounds through the pistol. She assumed a modified Weaver stance, a two-handed grip on the weapon that turned her left side to whatever threat lay out there, and she pivoted her whole body as she scanned the shadows for Jennings. She kept her finger out of the trigger guard even more consciously than usual, knowing that to kill this animal would be to lose track of her daughters.
Ashley and Kelly. Ashley and Kelly.
He wasn’t in the living room and he wasn’t in the center hall. That left either the dining room on the right or the kitchen that lay behind it. The kitchen where all the knives rested in the drawers. The kitchen where—
“Scorpion! The back door!” Irene yelled. “He’s bolting!” Again, no doubt. Irene took off at as close to a run as she could manage through the cluttered dining room, pushing furniture aside and vaulting over even more crap on the floor, as she made her way to the swinging saloon doors that separated the dining room from the kitchen.
She’d spent so much time in this place during the investigation that she felt as if she’d grown up here. She didn’t need additional light to know that the appliances were all an awful shade of brown, or that the wallpaper was an even more awful shade of orange.
Her eyes went right to the back door, which lay wide open. Past the sound of her own labored breathing, she could hear footsteps outside, nearly lost in the thunder of footsteps pounding back down the interior stairs as Scorpion and Big Guy hurried to catch up.
Irene slid to a stop before exposing herself to the outside through the exterior kitchen door, just in case Jennings had found himself a weapon and was lying in wait. Leading with her SIG, she pivoted out onto the stoop and was relieved to find that the Jennings’s head start was not as large as she had feared. She was doubly relieved to find that he’d made a huge mistake.
In a tight chase, when the chasers are limited to their feet as their primary mode of transportation, the smart play was always to run for it. With a thirty- or forty-second head start, it might be smart to try to start the car—or in Jennings’s case, a crotch-rocket Suzuki motorcycle—but with less lead than that, you screw yourself with the time it takes to find keys, get them into the ignition, and accelerate away before your highly motivated pursuers tear you apart.
Irene holstered her weapon even as she ran down the three stairs to the alleyway behind the town house. She was going to do this the old-fashioned way. The satisfying way.
Jennings looked up just seconds before the impact. His eyes looked like billiard balls as he calculated what was coming his way. He hurried to don his motorcycle helmet.
He never came close. The helmet flew five feet as Irene hit him at a dead run, driving her shoulder into the spot just below the juncture of his neck and his breastbone. He barked like a dog as the air was expelled from his lungs, and his arms flailed as Irene’s momentum drove him clear of the bike and back into the rickety fence that separated Jennings’s backyard from the next door neighbors’.
Lights came on next door and a dog barked. Stealth was no longer part of the equation. From here on out, it was about speed, and before Irene could even process the pleasure of beating the crap out of this guy, Big Guy’s beefy hands were on her shoulders, lifting her like she weighed nothing and placing her to the side while Scorpion stepped over the mess and slipped a black hood over Jennings’s head. That done, he rolled the monster onto his stomach and nearly ripped Jennings’s arms out of their sockets as he pulled them behind his back and cinched his wrists together with flex cuffs.
“Let me go!” Jennings yelled. “Help!”
Jonathan kicked him in the ribs, and leveraged him to his feet by lifting his arms.
Jennings yelled again, but after a second kick, he fell silent. He seemed to have gotten the point that quiet was better than noisy.
Irene stepped out of the way as Big Guy took over for Scorpion, hoisting the bound and bagged Barney Jennings over his shoulder like a duffel bag and leading the way back to up the steps, through the house, and out to the waiting van, where he dumped him heavily onto the floorboard.
“Get in and sit on him,” Boxers said. “We’ve got company.” A man and a woman in nightclothes had appeared on the porch of the house next door. They both looked terrified.
As Boxers walked around the front to the driver’s seat and Jonathan sat shotgun, Irene rolled the door shut and literally sat on their prisoner. The sound of sirens rose in the distance.
“That went well,” Boxers said as he eased away from the curb.
“Take it nice and slow,” Jonathan said. “Draw as little attention as possible. We only need a mile and a half.” As he spoke, he pulled off his mask. Boxers did the same, and so did Irene. As long as the bag stayed in place over Jennings’s head, they shouldn’t have to worry about being recognized.
“You know those sirens are for us, right?” Irene asked. “Somebody called the police.”
Jennings shifted under her. “Police?” he said. Muffled by the bag, his voice sounded strained under her weight. “You’re not the police? Who the hell are you?”
Irene bounced on him. Hard. “We’re the beginning of the worst weeks of your life.”
Jonathan turned in his seat to face her. He was smiling.
“You can’t do this!” Jennings protested. “This is kidnapping.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” Irene replied.
“But I have rights. You can’t do this.”
She bounced on him again, harder this time. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll do something a lot worse that I don’t have a right to do.”
“Face it, asshole,” Big Guy said from the front. “From here on out, you’re one-hundred-percent victim. Whatever happens to you from here on out—good or bad—is because we make it happen.” A beat. “And if that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, you’re not paying attention.”
“But I didn’t do anything!”
Irene drew her SIG and thumped him on the head with the butt of the grip. “What part of
shut up
confused you?” It was a solid thump, too, one she was pretty sure had drawn blood.