The Last Target Page 17

  “They’re getting away.”

  “They’re already gone, son.” His mother placed a hand on his forearm. “You’ll find them. I know you will.”

  Denton staggered through the back door, his hand atop a knot on his head. His lip was busted, and blood stained his shirt. “Luke. It was Luke. He knocked me out, tied me up.” He glanced around the room. “Where are Rachel and Aidan? What happened?”

  “Apaka. They got them.” Jack clenched his fists in anger.

  At that moment, flashing lights sliced through the curtains. The emergency medical squad arrived. Two medics stayed inside to check out Jack’s injuries, and two went to the barn for Luke. The medics kept insisting that Jack go to the hospital, but he couldn’t stop. Not right now. Instead, they did a temporary bandage on his arm.

  He needed the local authorities’ help in locating the car that Rachel had gotten into. He could only get that assistance with Vice Admiral Harris’s help. He reached for his phone, but it wasn’t in his pocket. It must have dropped somewhere. Instead, he grabbed his parents’ phone and dialed the vice admiral’s number, one he knew by heart. The vice admiral answered on the first ring.

  “Jack Sergeant, sir. I need your help. A car picked up Rachel and Aidan. I don’t know who was inside or where the car went. I need your help to put out an All Points Bulletin on it.”

  “What happened?”

  Jack explained what he could. Time was ticking away, though. He needed to be out there searching for Rachel himself.

  “I’ll make a call to the Fayette County sheriff now,” Vice Admiral Harris said.

  “Thank you.” Jack hung up.

  He realized he’d never told Vice Admiral Harris that they were in Ohio, though.

  Rachel looked over at her uncle, who sat in the seat beside her. A uniformed man silently drove them away from danger. “I’m glad you got there when you did, Uncle Arnold. You were a real life saver. Luke was working for Apaka. I still can’t believe it!”

  “I know. We decided to dig a little deeper into the backgrounds of the men at Eyes. After everything that had happened there, we figured someone there was working for the other side. It was just a matter of pinpointing who. I would never have guessed it was Luke.”

  “So you drove all the way out to Ohio?”

  Something flickered across her uncle’s face. “I wanted to look into Luke’s eyes myself. After all, he used to work for me. It just so happened I arrived when everything went down.”

  Jack’s face flashed in her mind. He’d jumped in front of the bullet to save her. A tear popped into her eye. Her uncle patted her hand.

  “It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay, dear.”

  She nodded, wanting to believe him.

  They drove for what seemed like forever—it was probably only a few hours in reality, though. In between urgent-sounding phone calls her uncle took regarding the situation, Rachel relayed what had happened, about Jack and Luke and Simon. Finally, they stopped in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. A cabin surrounded by woods in who knows where.

  “Another safe house?” When would it end? She wanted Jack near her, protecting her.

  Her uncle nodded. “Yes, another safe house. Hopefully this will be the last one.”

  They stepped inside the cabin, which already had guards, barred windows, a security system and multiple locks on the door.

  “I think you’ll be comfortable here,” her uncle said. “We have a room especially designed for your safety.”

  Comfortable? She doubted it. It was just another prison. How long would she be at this one?

  Her uncle walked to a door located on the back wall of the house, inserted a key and pushed it open. “Why don’t you check your new space out?”

  Rachel nodded. Holding Aidan’s hand, she stepped forward. The room was larger than she’d expected, with no windows. A couch sat at the center of the space. Rachel was surprised to see the back of two heads there. There were other people staying at the safe house?

  Rachel paused, something oddly familiar about them. Her heart played an odd beat and she rubbed her eyes a moment. She had to be seeing things. She stepped closer.

  “Mom? Dad?”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Rachel? Aidan?” her mom whispered.

  Rachel flew across the room and into her mother’s arms. Her dad joined them, wrapping his arms around them both.

  Rachel pulled back and held them both at arm’s length. Time had taken a small toll on them. Both looked grayer, thinner, paler. But they were alive. “I can’t believe it’s you. That you’re here. That you’re alive.”

  Her dad pulled her into another hug. “Oh, Rachel. I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “I didn’t think I’d see you either. I thought…I thought…” All at once, she remembered the day she got the news of her parents’ accident. The police officer at her door, their bodies burned beyond recognition, their double funeral.

  Her mother’s face twisted into a frown. “I know.”

  Rachel stepped back and shook her head, trying desperately to comprehend everything that was happening. “I don’t understand.”

  Her mother’s frown deepened. Her mom and dad looked at each other, grimaces across their features. Before they could say anything else, a shadow filled the doorway.

  “You’ll have plenty of time to catch up,” Uncle Arnold said. His once comforting face now looked menacing with his wrinkled forehead and a smile slightly curling one side of his mouth.

  Rachel’s eyes narrowed. “What’s going on? I don’t understand. You knew, Uncle Arnold? This whole time you knew they were alive and you didn’t tell me?”

  He smiled, but the action didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m sorry, Rachel. There were just other more important things at stake.”

  Weren’t those the exact words that Luke had used earlier?

  Rachel grabbed Aidan and backed up, away from her uncle. “You work for Apaka?”

  His smile slipped some. “You could say that.”

  “How could you work for them? They’re trying to kill me. They kill innocent people every day. And you…you work for the Department of Defense. I thought you loved your country.” Rachel looked back at her parents, begging for a sign of understanding. What was going on? Why were her parents still alive? Nothing made sense.

  Uncle Arnold glanced at his watch. “I actually have some things I need to tend to back in Washington. I’ll be back in the morning. 6:00 a.m.” His gaze cut to her parents. “You’ll have until then to decide whether you’re going to give me the information I want. If not…” He looked at Rachel and smiled. The message was loud and clear: If not, she would die.

  He stepped from the room and a lock clicked in place. They were all stuck in this tiny, windowless room. Rachel looked at her parents, confusion and fear colliding inside. “What’s going on?”

  Vice Admiral Harris had been involved this entire time? He was the true inside man. Simon had just been a cover-up. Luke had just been a henchman.

  How could Jack not have seen it?

  The better question was, how was he going to discover where Rachel was? He’d bet anything that Vice Admiral Harris had her and Aidan. But where would he take them?

  “What do you want to do? Your call. I’m behind you, whatever you decide,” Denton said.

  “I can’t call the Department of Defense. No one will take my word over the vice admiral’s.” Even to Jack, the story seemed far-fetched.

  He glanced at his watch, his shoulder still throbbing. He knew that every second counted. He needed a plan and he needed it now. First, he needed to call his contact with the FBI. Where had he left his phone? Had it fallen out in the barn?

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My phone. I can’t find it. It must have fallen out somewhere.”

  “Last time I saw it, Aidan was playing with it.”

  The boy loved to play games with the various apps he had on the device. What if Aidan had ta
ken his phone, slipped it into his back pocket maybe? Would Rachel realize that the phone was there? Would she call for help?

  Better yet…Jack had just installed a new app that would trace his phone’s location. If he could figure out where his phone was, he could figure out where Rachel and Aidan were.

  Rachel squeezed her mom’s hand as they sat beside each other on the ratty couch. Aidan nearly bounced out of her lap, he had so much pent-up energy. She prayed for patience before turning back to her parents.

  “So, the car accident was just a cover-up?”

  “Arnold was behind it all.” Her mom wiped away a tear and hugged Aidan to her again. “He even placed some old cadavers in the vehicle so no one would suspect anything.”

  Rachel shook her head. “Why would he do that? I still don’t understand.”

  Her parents looked at each other again, sharing that concerned expression that hadn’t left their faces since she’d arrived in this cabin.

  Her dad cleared his throat. “Arnold put us in charge of a joint government-authorized project with the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Defense. It was all top secret, on a need-to-know basis.”

  “What was it?” Rachel considered herself need-to-know right now.

  Her mom took over the story. “We developed a super bug that would destroy crops in other countries. In one day, this insect could wipe fields clean, leaving countries that were in opposition to the United States with nothing to eat. It would destroy their economy, make them more likely to bow to the demands of countries like the U.S.”

  “At first we thought the U.S. would only use this bug as a bargaining chip for countries that were in the middle of terrible humanitarian crises,” her dad said. “We thought the government would use it to benefit the hurting and the helpless. But we learned that certain people planned on using it to have the upper hand with countries for other reasons, reasons that were less than noble.”

  Her mom nodded sadly. “And besides that, there was always the risk that the bug wouldn’t die in twenty-four hours, that it would evolve and really spread to be a world crisis. You just can’t rely on guesses when it comes to things of this nature. It could destroy life as we know it.”

  “And imagine what it would do if the wrong people got their hands on it?” Her father leaned back into the couch, as if the idea still made him weary. “If someone set that bug loose in the United States, it would destroy all of our crops within a week’s period. We’d be left with nothing to eat. It would be a terrorist’s dream.”

  Her mom’s eyes lit with fire and she sliced her hands through the air. “That’s when we decided that we couldn’t do it. We couldn’t release the information to the government that we had spent months and months and millions of dollars to develop. We burned all of the information and made sure that no one would ever put the pieces together again.”

  “Your uncle didn’t like that, I can assure you. We got into so many fights about it.” Her dad leaned forward now, his elbows on his knees. His eyes looked sad, tired.

  Rachel searched through her memories for anything that would hint that all of this was going on. “I do seem to recall that you all weren’t speaking very much in the months before the accident. I guess that was why.”

  Her mother nodded. “It was. We didn’t know that your uncle was working for Apaka. He wanted to sell that information to them for a large price—just as he’d been selling other government secrets to them for a very, very long time.”

  “That’s how he could afford all of his houses.” The truth permeated Rachel’s thoughts.

  “The price tag he would have gotten for this super bug would have been out of this world.” Her dad shook his head. “There’s not a price tag you can put on a human life, though.”

  Rachel sucked in a deep breath, trying to comprehend everything. “I don’t understand—why does he hate the United States so much?” She looked at her father for an answer, since the two had been college roommates.

  “His own father was killed in battle. His mother used to hate war. I think he grew up listening to her talk about the evils of the United States and it just kind of became ingrained in him. But he learned to cover up his distain. He figured out that the best way to get revenge on the country was to get on the inside. He could do the most damage that way. And that’s what he’s been doing.”

  Rachel let go of her mother’s hand and rubbed her hands against her legs. She needed to fill her parents in on everything that happened leading up to this moment. “There’s been a list. My name was on it. Everyone else is dead.”

  Her mother’s face took on a burdened look, her eyes closing and her eyebrows pinching together. “Everyone on that list was connected to us. Most of them were people who helped us formulate the bug. We never told them the truth about what we were creating, but we always had covers using our jobs at the Department of Agriculture. They had no idea. Your uncle was trying to convince us to recreate the bug. He said if we didn’t, he’d kill the people on the list.”

  Her mother dabbed tears from her eyes. “We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t want to see innocent people die, but we kept thinking about the greater good. Millions would die if he got his hands on that information.”

  Her dad squeezed her hand. “And then he put your name on the list. I don’t think he really wanted to kill you. I think in some twisted way he does care about you. But he’s threatening to kill you if we don’t give him the information.”

  Her mom looked up, strain in her eyes. “He won’t kill us, because without us, he’ll never get the information he wants. That’s why he keeps threatening us, trying to find the last straw that will break our backs.”

  “And come tomorrow morning, he might discover that he’s finally found our one weakness.” Her dad shook his head, his voice cracking. “I just never thought he’d sink low enough to actually harm you or Aidan. Now I fear he’s desperate enough that he will. I just can’t bear the thought of that.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “I’ve got the coordinates of your cell phone!” Denton explained.

  Jack rushed to the computer and saw a map on the screen. A red star indicated the location of his cell phone. “West Virginia?” he muttered. “It looks like they’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s not even a marked road leading to their location.”

  “It would appear,” Denton agreed.

  “Figure out how far away that is from here.”

  “Already done. It’s three hours from here, approximately.”

  Jack glanced at the clock above the kitchen table and saw it was already past midnight. He wanted to work quickly before they changed locations again. That didn’t give him any time to mobilize any of his men to help, though. For now, it would just be him and Denton. He had no idea what they were going up against, either.

  “Jack—” his mother started. She stepped behind him, wringing her hands. Her eyes were wrinkled with fear.

  He kissed her cheek. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”

  Before she could argue anymore, he and Denton flew out the door. They had to get to Rachel and Aidan before Vice Admiral Harris wiped them off his hit list for good.

  Denton drove so Jack could rest his shoulder more. Jack eyed their location on the map, his mind racing with possibilities. He’d considered calling his cell phone. But what if the vice admiral didn’t know Aidan had the phone? If Jack called and the ringing phone alerted him to the device, they could lose their one lifeline. So he didn’t call. He waited instead.

  It was hard enough to believe that Vice Admiral Harris was involved somehow with Apaka, but it was even harder to imagine him putting Rachel and Aidan in danger. Maybe Rachel was right and her parents were the connection. His best guess would be that they were working on some kind of secret project. Maybe it had gotten them in trouble? Were all of the people on the list somehow connected to that project?

  Denton drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as the night stretched on before them. “Any
idea what we’re up against when we get to wherever it is we’re going?”

  “Not a clue. They’re in the middle of nowhere. Who knows how many men might be there or what kind of state Rachel and Aidan will be in. I can only pray that they’re not harmed.” He couldn’t even think about any other possibility.

  “Why would Vice Admiral Harris be involved with this?”

  Jack shared his theory.

  “But what would threatening people who helped out with this secret project accomplish? And why Rachel? It’s not like she’s going to know anything about her parents’ work.”

  “It almost seems like they’re trying to find out information.”

  “Maybe they’re marking off people until they get the answer they want.” But again, why would Rachel be on the list? She knew nothing. Why would her uncle not kill her when he’d killed the rest? “Denton, go faster. I have a bad feeling about this.”

  Rachel watched the minutes tick by on her watch. Aidan rested with his head in her lap. They sat on the ratty couch. Her parents sat across from them on a cot. Strain showed on their pinched faces. She still couldn’t believe that she was seeing them alive. It seemed impossible, like part dream, part nightmare.

  She stroked Aidan’s hair. “Have you been here for four years?” She glanced around the bland room and couldn’t imagine being here for that long.

  Her dad leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “No, they’ve moved us a few times.”

  “No chance of getting away?”

  Her mother shook her head. “No, none. Not at our age. It’s so secluded everywhere we’ve been. Even if we could get out of the house, the wilderness would claim us. There’s no one around for miles. They made sure that we knew that.”

  Rachel’s heart broke for her parents. This must have been torture for them.

  Torture.

  Her heart felt like it stopped at the thought. “Did they hurt you?” She hardly wanted to ask the question.