The Discarded

CHAPTER 34

“The bottom step lifts up,” Desirae said. “You’ll find some flashlights underneath.”

They were in the guest bathroom, standing near the entrance to the escape tunnel.

“Nate, take point,” Quinn said.

Nate ducked through the hole and vanished down the steps.

“You next,” Quinn told Orlando.

Gloria rendezvoused with King and Andres less than a minute after she’d called for them.

“Consider all targets hostile,” she said. “All I need is one of them alive enough to talk. Understood?”

Both men nodded.

“They’re somewhere in the back of the house,” she said. “We locate first and then neutralize the problem. You two go back around the front, I’ll take the rear, and we’ll meet on the west side.”

Staying on the lanai, Gloria hurried past the living room to the only window between it and the far corner, and peeked in. No lights on, but enough illumination leaking in from the hallway to discern the shape of a twin bed and a dresser. This room was too small to be the main bedroom. Turning down the west side, she found another window looking into the same bedroom, but it provided no more help.

A moment later, King and Andres appeared at the other end.

When they met in the middle, she whispered, “I take it they’re hiding in the master bedroom.”

“You didn’t find them?” King asked, surprised. “They weren’t in the rooms we checked.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Dammit.”

She motioned for Andres to turn around, then pulled out the lock-pick set, three disposable masks, a couple of flash-bang grenades, and a tear gas canister. The last she kept for herself, while handing a flash bang each to the two men.

They hurried around to the door into the living room. Gloria picked the lock and they all pulled on their masks.

Just loud enough for her men to hear, she said, “One, two, three.”

She shoved the door open and rushed across the living room to the hallway entrance. Immediately, Andres and King tossed their grenades toward the bedrooms.

Bang! Bang!

The double explosion filled the house with sound and light.

Gloria pulled the pin on the tear gas canister and lobbed the can to the back of the hallway. With a hiss, smoky gas began to fill the rooms.

She waited for the first cough, knowing it would come in a matter of seconds, but all remained quiet. She gave it another few moments, and then raised her gun and led her men to the back of the house. When they reached the end of the hall, they each took one of the rooms.

“Clear!” King called from the hallway bathroom.

“Clear!” Andres called from the smaller bedroom.

“Shit,” Gloria said as she stood in the deserted master bedroom, then added, “Clear.” She reentered the hallway. “Where the hell did they go?”

Before anyone could venture a guess, her earpiece beeped.

“This is Nolan. I may have found something you’ll be very interested in.”

“I sure as hell hope so. We haven’t found crap here.”

He told her about the man and the girl, and then floated the possibility of who she might be.

Andres’s eyes widened. “In here,” he said, then disappeared inside the second bedroom.

“Did you hear me?” Nolan asked.

“Just a second,” she told him as she followed Andres.

Lights were now on in the room, so there was no mistaking it for anything but what it was: a preteen girl’s bedroom.

Not proof. Not even close. But in her bones, Gloria could feel everything aligning.

I’m so close.

“Nolan, stay on her,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We’re on our way.”

Gloria and Andres returned to the hallway and found King waiting for them. As they started toward the living room, she noticed something odd.

The haze in the bedrooms had hung in the air, hardly drifting at all, but in the hall, it was being drawn into the bathroom.

She looked inside, thinking the window must be open, but it wasn’t, nor was the gas moving in its direction. It was drifting toward the sink. More accurately, it appeared as if it was being sucked in around the cabinet the sink was in.

“Hold this.” She shoved her rifle at King and then pulled the cabinet doors open. She was fully expecting to see no back panel, but it was there like it should be. Odder still, there was no smoke in the cabinet.

She ran a finger along the seam where the counter met the wall and felt a slight separation that continued all the way around the side. She gripped the countertop and gave the cabinet a yank but it didn’t move.

“Give me a hand,” she said.

King and Andres set down their weapons and grabbed on. The cabinet creaked when they pulled, and the gap between it and the wall increased to nearly a quarter inch, but that was all they got.

“There has to be a release,” she said, checking under the lip of the countertop.

Nothing there, so she felt along the sides of the box, and then opened the doors again and searched the inner frame.

“Ha!” she yelled as her finger touched a button.

She pushed it and felt the vibration of something releasing.

When she yanked the cabinet again, it moved effortlessly away from the wall, revealing a hole and the top few steps of a staircase.

“Grab your guns. Time to go hunting.”

The muffled boom of the grenades echoed down the tunnel, but they were all too well trained to stop and look back.

“How much farther?” Quinn asked Desirae.

“Not too much.”

Another minute on, they heard a noise in the distance, a kind of groan.

Quinn looked back at Desirae, an eyebrow raised.

“Keep going,” she said.

Several moments later, they heard footsteps on the planks covering the stairs behind them. Without saying anything, they picked up their speed. As soon as they reached the end, Nate raced up the stairs and, following Desirae’s directions, shoved the door open.

“Nate and I can pin them down here while you two catch up to Tessa and Abraham,” Quinn said to Orlando and Desirae as soon as they were out and the door was closed. “Let me know as soon as you’ve gotten them out of here and we’ll join you.” He looked at Nate. “Pistols only, and spread out so if they throw a grenade it doesn’t get both—”

A faint but unmistakable scream cut him off.

Desirae twisted toward the sound. “That’s Tessa,” she said as she ran into the jungle.

Orlando took off after her.

Quinn and Nate hesitated. The trapdoor provided the perfect chokehold to tie down their pursuers, but the others must have split their forces and sent some into the jungle. How many? No way to know, but the most pressing danger was clearly to Tessa.

Quinn looked at his partner and saw Nate was thinking the same thing.

Without a word, they headed into the jungle.

As Abraham reached out to push a branch to the side, his foot slipped on a loose bit of ground. He staggered forward, the branch he’d been trying to avoid slapping him in the face, and was just barely able to keep himself from falling.

“Are you okay?” Tessa asked, looking back.

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Let’s keep going.”

She eyed him, as if unsure whether or not to believe him, before turning back to the path and moving on.

It was surreal, him being here with her on the run again. Hell, him finding her, seeing her once more when he thought he never would — that was the most surreal part. In those times when he felt sure she was still alive, that he couldn’t have transported her thousands of miles only for her to be killed later, his mind would still not give him a happy ending. An endless string of horrible alternate possibilities intruded — neglect, violent and mental abuse, forced servitude, prostitution.

Thank God none had been true. It was obvious Desirae loved the girl and had given Tessa as close to a normal life as she could, while preparing the girl to deal with the very real possibility that the danger that had taken her birth mother would return.

“Careful here,” Tessa said, pointing at some roots that had grown across the path.

Abraham watched his step, not wanting a repeat of the near disaster from a few minutes ago. A moment after he cleared the root, he heard the rustle of brush from somewhere along the path behind them.

He rushed forward. “Kill the light,” he whispered.

As the beam flickered out, he heard the sound of a step. He put a hand on Tessa’s back and ushered her off the path into the wild. He wanted to keep going but knew they were making too much noise, so they crouched as low as they could about a dozen feet off the path.

“Maybe it’s Mom,” Tessa whispered.

“I hope so. She’d want us to play it safe, though.”

She nodded, her brow creased in worry. He put an arm around her. After a slight hesitation, she leaned against him, shaking. For a moment he was taken back to Japan, when, though scared, she had put all her trust in him.

A crunch.

Abraham peered through the foliage back toward the path, but saw only indistinct shapes of plants and trees. Several quiet seconds passed before he heard steps again. They were light, almost imperceptible, the movements of someone trying very hard to not be heard.

Quiet again, three seconds, and then the crunch of dirt and a man passing through Abraham’s field of vision. He was mostly a shadow, but Abraham could see the man well enough to know he was neither Quinn nor Nate.

Abraham could feel Tessa’s shuttering breath as she, too, saw the man. Abraham squeezed her shoulder and moved his mouth to her ear. “I need you to stay here.”

She jerked her head back and looked at him in horror. “No,” she mouthed.

“I’m going to see where he’s going, that’s all,” he whispered. “I’ll be right back.”

She shook her head. “Don’t leave me.”

The words drove a knife into his heart.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”

She leaned into him hard and he put his other arm around her.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Nolan’s concern grew with every passing second.

Tracking the girl and the man had been relatively easy. They were surprisingly quiet but not completely so, and he was able to follow them without keeping them in sight.

About two minutes earlier, there had been an increase in noise for a few seconds, and then nothing. He figured they’d passed through a section that was more overgrown than others, but as he continued down the path himself, he found no such area, nor could he hear them ahead of him anymore.

He stopped, realizing they must have turned off the path somewhere behind him. Either there was another path he’d missed or they were hiding. Using the illumination of his cell phone, he studied the ground. The only prints were his.

With extreme care, he retraced his route, stopping every few seconds until he finally spotted the others’ footprints. After he determined the exact spot where they disappeared, he pulled out his gun and turned toward the jungle.

Something didn’t feel right.

Abraham looked toward the path but it was empty. He listened but could hear nothing unusual. Still, that old sense of impending danger that had kept him alive for so many years was on alert.

He whispered in Tessa’s ear, “I want you to quietly crawl back until you find a good hiding place.”

She looked at him, silently asking, why?

“Please,” he said.

Lip trembling, she nodded.

As she backed away, Abraham concentrated on the path again. Still nothing there. So why had his sense—

A sound about halfway between the path and where he was. Without another thought, he moved to his left, slipping between two bushes. It wasn’t quite as easy as it should have been. His right leg was stiffening from all the walking and crouching, but it was by far not the only ache and pain he felt.

Suddenly, a shadow of a man slipped out from the brush, low to the ground, and in his hand was a gun. When he reached the area where Abraham and Tessa had been, he paused. In his other hand was a glow, shining on the ground.

Our tracks, Abraham realized.

The man moved the light in an arc before looking in the direction Tessa had gone. He started creeping forward.

Letting his old instincts take over, Abraham launched himself forward with as much speed as his sore legs could generate, slamming into the man’s back as the guy was twisting around. They rolled through the brush, Abraham ending up on the bottom with the man’s back in his face.

An elbow whacked into Abraham’s side. He tried to throw an arm around the guy’s chest, but the man easily batted him away.

Abraham pushed and rolled just enough to get the guy off him.

The gun.

He reached for the man’s hands, knowing he had to keep the guy from pulling the trigger. But both the man’s hands were empty.

Abraham spotted the weapon lying on the ground a few feet away and lunged for it, but the man had seen it, too, and got there the same time Abraham did. They struggled, each getting a temporary grip on the handle, but in the end it was the man who slipped his finger over the trigger.

Abraham latched on to the suppressor, pushing it as hard as he could so the barrel couldn’t be turned on him.

The man pulled the trigger.

A thup echoed softly through the jungle as the bullet drove harmlessly into the ground several yards away. Abraham yanked his hands away from the now white hot suppressor.

As the man started to aim the gun at him, Tessa screamed from somewhere in the jungle behind them. The shooter turned his head toward the sound, giving Abraham the opening he needed.

He rammed his knee hard into the man’s groin. As the guy cringed, Abraham hit him with an uppercut under his jaw, rattling his teeth and dazing him. Abraham then wrenched the gun away and put it against the man’s chest. The double thup as Abraham pulled the trigger twice were nearly silent this time, the body absorbing most of the sound.

He straightened up. “Tessa?” he said in a loud whisper. “Tessa? Are you all right?”

He ran back in the direction she’d gone.

“Tessa?”

“Here,” she said, her voice small and shaky.

He turned around and spotted her curled against the back of a rock, trying to look as small as possible.

“I thought he was going to shoot you,” she said.

“I’m okay. Everything’s fine. Just like I told you.”

“Is he…”

“He’s not going to bother us,” Abraham said, and held out his hand. “Come on. We need to keep going.”