The Agent's Daughter (19 page)

As he walked into his office, Evan saw
Melina sitting in his chair staring at the computer monitor on his
desk.

“
Hey, kiddo,” he
said.

Melina did not look up, but she did offer
some half-garbled sound that served as a hello back to Evan. She
was deep into reading a post on the PosterBoard social networking
site.

“
I can’t believe my friend
Lindsey went through with getting her hair highlighted,” she said
as looked over at her dad.

“
I would love to hear
about Lindsey’s hair adventures,” Evan said as he moved toward the
desk, “but I need to check my email so we can get
going.”

Melina got up from the chair and walked over
to the window. Evan had a spectacular view from the seventh floor,
and on a clear day like today, you could see all the way to Love
Field airport.

Evan sat down and called
up the email program. Once it loaded, he scanned down the list of
new emails. It was an endless list of
forwards
and
carbon copieds
. The usual, routine
office emails. As he scrolled down the list, there was an email
that caught his eye. It was from what appeared to be the agency
security department. The email was not from a person but was from a
general security email address. Evan thought that it was more
office spam, but then he looked at the title of the email:
Laura’s Accident.

Evan immediately clicked on the email to
open it. It read:

Laura’s accident. Maybe not an accident. See
the attached picture from the red light camera at the
intersection.

Evan was now anxious. He knew of the
intersection where Laura had her accident. He avoided it because it
was just too painful for him to see it, but he remembered that the
intersection had a red light camera. It took pictures of people
that had run a red light at the intersection and then mailed them a
ticket. A photo was included with the ticket as proof. There must
be some mistake. He had not received a ticket in the mail.
Although, the more he thought about it, he had received a lot of
mail related to Laura’s accident that he had tossed aside because
he couldn’t bear to open it.

Evan clicked on the attachment and a picture
opened and filled the screen. It was a picture of the front end of
a car, clearly showing the front bumper, the hood, and the
windshield of the car. He recognized the license plate as the one
from his car. Through the windshield, you could see Laura. But
there was something wrong. She was not sitting up. She was slumped
over to the side of the car with her face tilted toward the
passenger seat. Her eyes were closed, and she did not have her
hands on the steering wheel.

Evan gasped. Melina heard him, stepped away
from the window, and looked over his shoulder at the computer
screen.

“
That’s a picture of Mom
in your car!” Melina exclaimed.

“
The email indicated that
it was from the red light camera at the intersection of the
accident,” he said. “It says that her accident maybe was not an
accident.”

“
Why isn’t she steering?”
Melina said loudly. “She looks as if she’s asleep!”

Evan arched his brow, “Something is not
right. We need to show this picture to the police and have them
investigate.”

Evan pulled a flash drive from a drawer in
his desk and connected it to the computer. He downloaded the
picture onto the drive, removed it, and put it in his pocket.

“
Let’s go,” he said. “I
want to go right to the police station.”

They ran out of Evan’s
office to the elevator, and Melina pressed the
down
button repeatedly.

“
One time is enough,
kiddo,” Evan said calmly. “The numbers are moving, so it is on its
way down.”

The doors to the elevator opened, and they
stepped inside. Melina pressed the button for the garage floor
repeatedly. Evan ignored it this time. The doors shut, and the
elevator began its descent.

Evan was trying to think of what the picture
could mean when Melina voiced the question aloud.

“
What does it mean, Daddy?
She looked asleep just as she entered the intersection. It’s like
she wasn’t even driving.”

“
I don’t know,” he said.
“The police did an accident investigation. When we get there, we
can look at the …”

Evan stopped talking as the elevator ground
to a halt with a loud and jarring thud. He grabbed Melina just
before she slammed into the wall of the elevator.

“
What happened to the
elevator?” Melina asked.

Before Evan could answer, one of the roof
tiles in the elevator slid over, and a small canister the size of a
can of soda was tossed in. It landed in the corner of the elevator
and burst open emitting a dense green fog. Almost instantly, the
entire elevator was engulfed. Evan recognized what it was. He held
his breath, so he could try to use the elevator control panel and
open the doors, but the fog made it difficult to see. He looked
over and saw Melina fall to the floor of the elevator unconscious.
When the elevator failed to respond, he reached into his pocket and
pulled out his phone. He quickly dialed the numbers 7-1-1. This was
the emergency number available on all agent phones. It was answered
twenty-four hours a day by an operator at the agency. As he dialed
the last digit of 711, he lost consciousness and fell in a heap on
the elevator floor next to Melina.

“
Hello, 711 operator. What
is your emergency, Evan?” the phone in his hand said.

After a moment, the elevator started back up
and continued to the garage floor. The doors opened, and a man in a
gas mask walked up to Evan and Melina on the floor of the elevator.
He picked up the phone and turned it off. Then he waved to two
other men getting out of a van parked next to the elevator
door.

“
Load them into the back
of the van.”

Evan opened his eyes and slowly focused on
the object in front of his face until he realized that it was the
bottom of a shoe. Somewhat disoriented, he was tried to figure out
why he was lying on the floor staring at a shoe when he realized
that Melina was lying next to him, and the shoe was hers.

He immediately jumped up and knelt at her
side. “Melina! Melina! Wake up!” he said as he turned her on her
back.

She shifted her position on her own, so he
could tell that she was alive, but he could not get her to wake up.
It was then that he looked around, and he saw that they were lying
on the cement floor of a dingy room about the size of a two-car
garage. The room was almost entirely bare except for a string of
empty shelf units along one wall, and a single freestanding cabinet
that stood next to a sink on the opposite wall. There were no
windows, but the room was brightly lit by several banks of
fluorescent lights hanging in rows from the ceiling. The room
looked as if it once had been used as a maintenance room for an
office building.

Evan tried to get up, but his legs buckled
and he dropped back down to the floor. He was still a little groggy
as he got on his hands and knees and looked down at the floor. The
exposed cement appeared to have been stained by years of chemical
spillage, and there was a gradual slope toward a metal drain in the
center of the room.

Confused about why they were there, Evan
paused as he tried to remember the recent past. Finally, the
grogginess in his head subsided, and it came back to him that they
were in the elevator at work when a can was tossed into it from
above. Then there was a fog. Evan knew the can could have been only
one thing. An FC-33 Fog Canister. Otherwise, known around the
agency as an FCAN. Pronounced ‘F-can’, the agents had their own
interpretation of what the ‘F’ stood for. Standard issue for agents
in the field, they are used to neutralize the people in a room
before the agents enter. Disguised as a regular soda can, they are
activated the same way one would open a soda. The dense fog is used
to create a cover to conceal the agent’s movements while also
containing a powerful sedative to render the victims
unconscious.

Evan looked back at Melina. The sedative was
still in her system. He took off his jacket, balled it up, and put
it under her head for a pillow, hopeful that she would wake up
soon.

Wherever they were, Evan wanted to get them
out. He looked around and spied the only door in the room, a solid
metal door ten feet to his right. He ran over to the door and tried
the doorknob, but a deadbolt prevented the door from opening. There
was a place for a key in the deadbolt, but it was missing.
Frustrated, Evan took a step back and kicked an area of the door
around the jamb as hard as he could kick, but his foot was no
match. It only made a loud noise that echoed throughout the
room.

Behind him, Evan could hear the faint
groaning of Melina waking up. He turned around to see her sitting
up rubbing her eyes.

“
What was that noise?”
Melina said, continuing to rub her eyes.

Evan ran over to her. “Are you all right,
kiddo?”

“
Umm, yeah,” she said
looking around, her head still spinning. “Where are we?”

“
I’m not sure where we
are, or why we are here,” Evan said as he looked around again. “The
wood trim on the walls and the electrical fixtures give me the
impression that we are in a fairly old building. Maybe early
twentieth century. Probably an old abandoned office building. I
can’t say for sure.”

That bothered him. Evan was someone that
always planned things out, so he was not used to not knowing what
was going on. Or where he was. The only thing that was clear was
that they had been kidnapped and locked in a room. Who had done it
was not as clear. His work had made him many enemies over the years
so it could be anybody. The worst part about it though was that
whatever it was he was dealing with now involved his daughter.

“
I’m not going to
sugar-coat it, honey,” he said. “It appears that we have been
kidnapped and locked in this room.”

Melina still trying to wake up rubbed her
eyes. “Kidnapped … what?”

“
Someone tossed an FCAN in
the elevator at my work that knocked us out and then they kidnapped
us.”

Melina opened her eyes as wide as they would
open. That seemed to help with the last of the cobwebs. She looked
over at her dad. “What? What’s an FCAN?”

“
A fog canister. It is
just what you would think it is from the name. It is a small
canister that when activated and thrown into an area, inundates the
area with an opaque fog. Some of the time it is used to create a
visual barrier but most of the time it contains a chemical that can
make the occupants of the area unconscious.”

“
You speak as though you
use these things at work,” Melina said. “What, do you have some of
these FCANs in your desk?”

Actually, I do, he thought. That also got
him to thinking about the canisters themselves. The fog was a
sickly green color, just like the agency FCANs.

“
How long was I asleep?”
Melina asked.

Evan looked down at his wrist to check the
time, but his watch was gone. He reached into his pocket for his
cell phone. It was gone too. Then he checked all of his pockets and
they were empty. No keys. No wallet. His heart sank. Taking the
cell phone was understandable. It would prevent him from
communicating. But taking all his possessions meant that this was
not a typical hostage situation. He knew that when kidnappers did
not care that you were returned safely, they took your belongings.
This made it harder for anyone to identify you.

Evan looked over at Melina. “Do you have
your cell phone? Did they empty your pockets too?”

Melina put a hand in each of her pockets.
They were all empty. “They took my cell phone and everything
else.”

“
We’ve got to get out of
here,” Evan said as he began to look more intently for a way out.
He started at one wall and looked for any hidden doors or windows.
He was halfway through looking at the second wall when he heard
Melina behind him.

“
Hey!” she said. “There is
a spot of light on the floor.”

Evan looked at the floor and saw a patch of
sunshine the size of a quarter on the floor near the door. He put
his hand on each side of it until he determined from the shadow
that it was coming from an area above one of the shelves on a far
wall. He ran over and climbed to the top of the shelf unit. As he
looked closer, he could see several one-foot tall and two-foot wide
panels embedded into the wall near the ceiling. One had a hole in
it that was allowing the light to reach the floor. He scratched at
the surface of the panel nearest him.

“
These panels are
painted-over windows!” he said.

He scanned the room for any cloth, and he
spotted an old rag lying in a heap in a corner of the room.

“
Melina, bring me that
rag,” he said, pointing to the corner.

She grabbed the rag and handed it to Evan.
He made a fist and wrapped the rag around it several times so that
it covered his entire hand. He turned to the window and began to
tap on the glass. Softly as first, and then a little harder each
time. He could tell that it was safety glass and would shatter into
a thousand pieces, but he wanted to break it slowly and with as
little noise as possible. No need to alert anyone what was going
on. Finally, there was a slight cracking sound and the window broke
into a maze of tiny fissures. Evan poked at the window with a
knuckle until there was a hole and then put his finger in the hole
and pulled backward. Hundreds of tiny glass pieces fell inward
creating a larger hole in the window. He looked through the hole
and saw metal bars staring back at him. The bars that business
owners put up to keep people from breaking into their business.