Chapter 3 - The Empty Fortress
By the time two patrol cruisers and my truck screeched to a halt in front of my suburban house, the blizzard was howling across the driveway like a sheet of white iron. The front door swung loosely on its brass hinges, groaning against the sub-zero wind.
I entered first, service weapon held at low ready, my combat instincts overriding the agony tearing through my chest.
The living room was ransacked. Drawers hung out of the mahogany credenza; the floor was littered with wrapping paper, broken Christmas ornaments, and shredded mail. In the corner where Clara had been locked on the cold hardwood, the severed zip ties lay like discarded skin.
“House is clear!” Officer Higgins shouted from the second floor. “Master bedroom is cleaned out!”
I took the stairs two at a time and entered the master suite. The walk-in closet was gutted. Victoria’s designer coats, her luxury handbags, and her jewelry boxes were gone. But worse was the steel wall safe behind the oil painting of our wedding day.
The heavy electronic keypad was scorched, forced open with a thermal torch. Inside, my contingency cash—fifty thousand dollars in emergency reserve—was gone. My expired diplomatic passports were gone.
And my secondary firearm, a suppressed Sig Sauer P226, was missing from its velvet tray.
“She had an extraction plan,” Miller said, stepping through the doorway with his flashlight sweeping the ransacked shelves. “She wasn’t improvising. She packed within twenty minutes of you leaving for the emergency room.”
I walked toward Victoria’s vanity mirror. Written across the glass in dark crimson lipstick was a single sentence:
*YOU SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN AFGHANISTAN, ALEX. NOW BOTH OF YOU DIE.*
Underneath the writing lay a small amber medical vial. I picked it up with a gloved hand. The label read: *Potassium Chloride - Concentrated Injection.*
A lethal paralytic. Unused. Which meant she had carried the phenobarbital with her—or Julian Mercer was already moving toward his final objective.
“Alex, listen to me,” Miller warned, catching my sleeve. “We put an APB on her Mercedes. We monitor the highways. You need to stay at the hospital with your girl.”
I pulled my arm free, my gaze locking onto the snowy darkness outside the shattered window. “Victoria doesn't run without the money. She can't cash the insurance without a body. If she can't kill me in a car crash, she’s coming to the only place she knows I have to return to.”
My radio clicked on my chest. It was Marcus Alvarez, my former squad sniper who was currently stationed outside Clara’s hospital room.
May you like
“Alex,” Marcus’s voice cut through the static, taut and lethal. “We’ve got a problem. A private ambulance just cleared the hospital security gate without an ID tag. And Clara’s vitals monitor just had its external telemetry cut.”
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