The older man dug the keys out of his pocket and headed for a beat-up, red truck. “We can track them down and come up with a plan. I’ll call up some of my National Security pals and try to see if they can task a satellite to look for your girlfriend and her new pals.”
Day frowned. “Okay, genius, how you going to accomplish that? Because last time I checked, satellite tracking still needed a phone or a device. And believe me, she’s got nothing on her.” His voice was smug. He had checked her. Several times. All over.
Edge smacked him at the back of the head. “Get your mind out of the bedroom. We don’t need a tracker or a phone on your girlfriend, we just need to track the bad guys. We can pick up chatter from this area from cellphones from the cell towers. They gotta make a call sometime to their boss, right? Once they figure out which cellphones belong to the bad guys, my pals can lock on to them and give us a good picture of where they’re going. When they’re locked, it won’t matter if its pitch dark or if they turn off the phones. The satellite will track them wherever they go.”
Day nodded, casting a look back at the Charger. Noting worth saving there, even if it hadn’t been stolen in the first place. Something Rollie hadn’t been happy about anyway. “Whatever it takes. I just gotta find her.”
***
The first thing Rollie realized when she finally came to was that her neck ached like a son of a bitch. Even worse than the bump she’d gotten from being whacked by that douche of a fake FBI agent. Or maybe he was real but on someone else’s payroll. She really didn’t care.
Her captors put her in a dark, dank room that seemed to be the basement of somewhere. If they had thrown in a few rats and some chains bolted to the walls, she could have sworn she was the her**ne cheesy suspense flick. The only glory points to those disasters were the hero’s muscles and skill in killing underpaid and semi-skilled henchmen, and the leading lady’s ability to look vulnerable and wickedly hot in ridiculously skimpy attire. Rollie had always hated women like that.
But she would have given anything for this to be a B movie. Even if she had to endure looking like a hysterical p*rn star just to make the hero look good, it would have meant Day would still be alive.
She sat up from her slouch, and her abused muscles complained. She tried to rub her aching neck, but discovered she was cuffed to the chair.
She closed her eyes for a moment to will away the spinning room but instead found herself reliving the few seconds in slow motion when the bullets had struck Day’s body and he fell to the ground in an unmoving heap.
She snapped her eyes open and struggled to breathe. She wanted to stop the flow of tears, but she couldn’t. Then she didn’t bother. There wasn’t any point.
“Oh, Day,” she whispered as grief threatened to overwhelm her. She loved him, and he was dead. All her life, she’d been looking for someone to love, waiting for this feeling of belonging and happiness. As soon as she’d found it, it was taken from her.
She stared up at the ceiling. Her sobs were silent, only her ragged breaths indicating her heartbreak as tears spilled over from her unseeing eyes.
And then slowly, as the tears fell and dried up, anger began to take their place. She had been born in the ugliest recesses of so-called civilized society, and she had fought for everything she ever had. She never knew her parents, and the only family she knew had been murdered. And then there was Day.
She quickly stifled her thoughts when she heard several footsteps approaching from the other side of the door. She swiped her tears away as the rusty lock twisted open. The door swung open and slammed against the wall.
“Right, bitch. Time to get to work.” Dark figures converged on her, and she was un-cuffed and hauled from the chair. She had sat twisted in the chair for so long that her legs had gone numb. She stumbled as they shoved her from the room, only the hard grip on her arm keeping her upright as she was bundled up the stairs and into the brightly lit corridor beyond. She winced, her eyes frantically trying to adjust after the darkness of the basement.
“Christ, you ain’t much to look at like this, are you?” One of the pseudo-agents sneered. “Gotta hope that you’ve got more than air in that head, otherwise Mr. Blackwell ain’t got no use for you. And if you ain’t useful…”
Rollie glared up at the man who shot Day. “Well, with that broken nose, you’re not really prince charming yourself,” she croaked. “And that slowly emerging bald spot won’t make your day any better, either.”
“Bitch,” he snarled, raising a hand, but then seemed to think better of it and shoved her along the corridor ahead of him. He opened a door. She saw the familiar confines of a lab beyond, and he viciously pushed her through it. “Plans are on the table. Get working. Oh, and take your time, sweetheart, because the longer you take, the longer I get you afterwards.”
Pushed through the door with more force than courtesy, Rollie caught herself on the edge of one of the worktables with a muttered curse.
“There’s more where that came from. Now get on with it.” The fake FBI agent gestured at one corner of the lab. The workbench there contained tools and equipment she recognized. The rest of the lab was identical to pretty much every other lab she’d worked in, bar the armed guy standing outside the door and the welded metal plate on the windows.
“What, no tea and flowers? I’m insulted,” quipped Rollie as she glowered at him. “You can tell your boss that I’m not making squat. And if he thinks sending someone to kidnap me and threaten me with torture and death is going to make me shiver, then he doesn’t know me that well. On the other hand, I’d just love to be alone in a room with you right now. With me carving you a new smile on your scrawny throat while you choke on your last gasp of bloody air.”
The agent lifted a hand, his expression gleeful. “Oh, I don’t think so, sweetheart. I think you’re going to do exactly what the boss wants you to. If you don’t, you know that brand spanking new lab and all your nice little employees? The ones with families and loved ones depending on them?”
Despite herself, she nodded. She had a bad feeling about this. The agent moved closer until she could smell the stink of his sweat under the sickly sweet cologne. He curled his fingers into a ball under her nose and suddenly splayed them open.
“Boom.”
“You sonofabitch.” She leveled a look of pure hatred at him. Blackwell and this sleazebag were willing to commit mass murder just to get what they wanted. She realized that if they were this determined, she could pretty much expect herself to be dead when all of this is over.
Or worse. Baldy’s plaything.
It was up to her now. Everything had always been. Just like before.
“Tell your boss I’ll build the reactor. But if anyone else gets hurt, I will destroy him.”
He smirked. “Yeah, right. What you gonna do? Bat your eyelashes? Pull the other one, darling, it’s got bells on. Jingle Bells.” He laughed and slammed the door shut behind him.
Rollie waited for him to leave before approaching the tools and materials on the table. She smiled slightly as she surveyed everything.
“Oh, it’ll definitely be an early Christmas for me, buddy boy.” she picked up a red container with danger labels all over it and went to work, whistling a jaunty Christmas tune.
***
In the desert heat outside the secure building Rollie was being held in, Day and Edge carefully stayed out of sight of any of the bored-looking guards.
Day hit the last corner, crouching down with his shoulder against the brickwork as he peered around the corner. Never do the expected. Never look around a corner at head height, or you were apt to get it shot off.
“This is too easy, Edge. You sure you got the right place?”
“Yep, and don’t ask me how I found out about this. You’re gonna owe me more than one on this one, Vann. And don’t believe what you see. If it looks easy, then it can only be a trap.”
Day snorted, checking the safeties on his own weaponry again. “By the time you’re finished, I may as well have made a deal with the devil. What’s this going to cost me?” he asked, checking around the corner again, his eyes narrowing as he checked targets. “Two x-rays. One half left, eleven o’clock. One quarter right at two. Which one do you want?”
“I’ll take the right.” Edge thumbed off his pistol’s safety. “Then you move to cover down the way, and I’ll cover your six. And do I look like I know everything? I’ll collect when I need it. Right now, let’s take care of this and bail your princess out.” Edge got ready to roll out. Since they were coming in from the right, Day had to go first.
“You’re a con artist,” Day muttered, using another quick glance around the corner to set his aim. “By the time you call this in, the deal will have changed, and I’ll owe you an arm and a leg. On three. One…two…three.”
The two men exploded into action. Their movements were precise and economical, lethal and fast as they stormed the building. The two guards went down in seconds, the pfft-pfft of silenced shots the only sound before the dull thump of bodies hitting the dirt.
Day approached the door, checked the knob and quietly opened it just far enough to peek to check for hostiles. No sense in announcing their presence just yet. The corridor beyond was empty. “We need to find her.” He jerked a thumb toward the dead guards. “When Pinky and Perky out there get found, the shit’ll hit the fan.”
“It’s these days I kinda miss doing what we used to do. Getting rid of the bodies during infil is a rookie’s job,” Edge complained. “If I were these guys and I was holding someone that could make a lot of noise, I’d stuff her in the basement, but not too far from a back exit in case I need to pull her out in a hurry.”
“Agreed.” Day nodded. “Okay, let’s have a look at that plan again.” He gestured for the cell phone Edge had produced earlier. His pals had come up trumps. Not only had they tracked Rollie within a couple of hours, but they’d also managed a pull a plan of the building where she was held.
Edge pulled it from his back pocket and handed it over. He kept his eyes on the corridor as Day checked. “Okay. Northwest corridor then, stairs to the lower levels are back there.”
He checked his magazine. “We need to double it. Sure you can handle the pace, old man?” he teased. Edge wasn’t that much older than he was.
“Hey, I’m just keeping your pace, boy. Don’t want you to trip and fall all over your own feet,” Edge retorted. “You fall on your pansy ass and crack something, you’ll start crying, and then I’ll have to shoot you just to keep you quiet.”
***
Rollie wasn’t staying idle at all. She wasn’t about to allow a scheming, greedy businessman like Blackwell have sole control over the world’s solution to the energy crisis for his own agenda.
She found the surveillance cameras they left in the room and worked on developing her escape strategy away from their prying eyes. If the bad guys decided to stick a scientist desperate to escape in a workshop filled with prime raw materials, then they really couldn’t be that smart, could they?