Side by Side Read online

  “You’re right, Winter.” Alexa smiled weakly as she searched his eyes with hers. “You have too much here to chance sacrificing it for two strangers. But I had to ask. It all seemed so perfect in my mind. The two of us side by side again. The only person I know I can totally trust with my life. Someone who will stay on goal and succeed no matter what other people throw at him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” he asked again.

  “Wasn’t something I could discuss over the telephone. And because I guess I thought you couldn’t refuse me if I was sitting with you when I asked.”

  “Alexa, I’m a civilian now. No badge. Even if I wanted to help you, I couldn’t do it legally. Why can’t you involve the Bureau? Locals?”

  “We go back too far for me to deceive you, Massey. I thought I couldn’t do this alone. I thought I had to have you to succeed. But I really don’t. You were my first choice, but I can go with a second or third.”

  Her smile didn’t play. Winter saw the disappointment in her eyes.

  “Tell me what the problem is,” he said.

  “You know Judge Hailey Fondren?”

  “I’ve been in his courtroom a few times on marshal business. Spoken a few times.”

  “Night before last, somebody kidnapped his daughter, Lucy Dockery, and her son, Elijah, from their home in Charlotte.”

  “So, you are here with the Immediate Response Team.”

  Alexa shook her head. “The judge didn’t call the FBI,” she said. “He couldn’t without risking their lives, so he called me for help . . . as a friend. I’ve known Hailey for years through the job. I knew Walter Dockery, his son-in-law, who was an assistant federal attorney.”

  “Fondren going to pay a ransom?”

  “This is not about money.”

  “Revenge?”

  Again, Alexa shook her head. “How much do you know about Hunter Bryce?”

  “Ex–Army colonel. Charged with killing an undercover ATF agent. Something about a weapons deal.” Winter remembered something. “Hailey Fondren’s been trying Bryce on the murder charge.”

  “Bryce was a Special Forces honcho, connected at the hip to Military Intelligence. He has powerful friends in the intelligence community, and he knows secrets about powerful people who don’t want him talking about them. His military records are mostly officially authored lies. He ended his career as a field functionary for M.I. in Afghanistan. Something happened there that should have ended in a court-martial and a life term for him and a couple of his men. Instead, Bryce was allowed to retire honorably.”

  “I’m not a big fan of shadowy men with powerful friends. I’ve never found it smart to trust any intelligence agency, and that’s based on near-death experience.”

  “Judge Fondren knows enough about Bryce to understand that his intelligence friendships extend into the Bureau, so he can’t risk any official FBI involvement in the kidnappings. Patrick Taylor, the ATF agent that Colonel Bryce killed, was a deep undercover agent who was known only to ATF personnel with top-level security clearances. Somehow Bryce found out about him.”

  Winter had seen the headlines about the high-profile trial. He despised the political nature of the intelligence organizations and the fact that their concern for people’s lives and safety often ran second to what was best for the advancement of an individual agent’s career. And he knew far too much about the human vipers that thrived in the intelligence community den.

  “Winter, the physical evidence against Bryce is overwhelming. His saliva was on Taylor’s face, his knife had Taylor’s blood under the handle, his boot prints were at the murder scene. Bryce declined any deals and waived a jury trial,” Alexa said. “I think he knew with one man to make the call, instead of twelve, exerting influence on that man was possible. So happens, he drew a judge whose soft underbelly is his family. Judge Fondren lost his wife and son-in-law in a car wreck a year back. Two days ago he got a call in the middle of the night telling him that his daughter and grandson had been taken. The caller told him that, unless he finds Bryce not guilty, Lucy and Elijah will be killed.”

  “If it was my family, I’d cut Bryce loose.”

  “If I can’t find them before Monday morning, he’ll set Bryce free. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “They’ll kill them anyway,” she told him.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “The people who did this for Bryce have nothing to gain by setting them free, and everything to lose. Hailey changes his mind, or Lucy Dockery says she and her son were kidnapped to make sure Bryce got a walk, and the decision to release him gets reversed. If the people who took the Dockerys have kept them alive, they’ll only keep them that way until Bryce is free on Monday. They might keep her alive in case they need to get her to speak to the judge before he goes into that courtroom.”

  “The judge will raise hell when he doesn’t get his family back,” Winter said. “So either way, the kidnappers lose.”

  “These people aren’t amateurs. They’ll make sure Judge Fondren never gets a chance to do anything.”

  “They’ll kill him, too?”

  “I’m certain of it. And the world is left with a mystery surrounding a disappeared daughter of a dead judge and her missing child.”

  “But they’ll keep them alive until after court Monday.” Winter was thinking aloud.

  “Odds fifty-fifty. They may keep the child alive to control Lucy. A mother will do anything to save her child. Lucy’s smart, but she’s been diagnosed as chronically depressed since her husband’s death, and she’s in the hands of violent people. She isn’t going to know how to outrun this kind of situation.”

  “Sounds like you have it figured. Who’s your second choice for a partner?”

  She shrugged. “I lied, Massey. There is nobody else. I can’t turn to anyone in the Bureau. This one is strictly off the books. The judge says he’ll make anything I have to do kosher after the fact.”

  “You know I want to help you.”

  “I know what I’m asking,” she said. “This is life-or-death, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  “I have to think about my family.”

  “Will you at least talk it over with Sean?”

  “Talk what over with me?” Sean said. She had come into the room soundlessly, holding the pot of coffee.

  “Alexa wants me to help her find a woman and a baby who’ve been kidnapped.”

  Sean said nothing. She waited for one of them to go on.

  “They’ll be killed unless I can locate them,” Alexa said.

  “Lex is off the books,” Winter told his wife.

  “Off what books?”

  “Means no official involvement or support,” Winter explained.

  “I can’t do it alone,” Alexa said. “If I could, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Will it be dangerous?” Sean asked. Her eyes were on Winter.

  “We’re dealing with people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill us if we get close,” Alexa answered. “People who know how and don’t mind doing it.”

  Winter said, “Alexa is sure they’ll kill the family if she doesn’t find them.”

  “Damn it,” Sean said. She shook her head slowly. “Alexa asked you to help her, Winter?”

  “I hated to ask, Sean,” Alexa interposed. “But I had to try.”

  “Isn’t there anyone else you can ask?”

  “There’s nobody like Winter, Sean. And there isn’t time to look for anybody else.”

  Sean’s features were like stone. Then she leaned down and kissed her husband on the cheek. “Well, if that’s the case, you two guys better get moving.”

  7

  Ferny Ernest Smoot, who was supposed to keep tabs on the old judge’s comings and goings, hated his name, so he answered only to “Click.” Click had followed Judge Fondren from his big house in Meyers Park to the Westin Hotel in downtown Charlotte. There the judge met a light-skin black woman and the pair sat down at a table in the hotel restaurant. Clic
k took a seat at a table across the room.

  Click’s father, Peanut Smoot, would want to know if the lady was a cop, but since she wasn’t in uniform, that wouldn’t be easy to figure out unless Click was to ask her, which of course he couldn’t. She could have been a businesswoman, a lawyer, another judge, the judge’s secretary, or even a mistress. She was old, but not half as old as the judge was. She was pretty good looking, but she didn’t have breasts that amounted to much, and she was more short than tall.

  Click knew the woman was staying at the hotel because she signed the bill that the waitress put on the table. What was odd was, after she signed the ticket, she leaned over close and said something to the judge, who turned to glance at a bearded man seated by himself across the restaurant. The woman leaned back and also looked over at the man. The bearded man they looked at didn’t notice them looking at him. So Click studied them all without acting like he was doing anything but eating—somebody who didn’t have any reason not to be minding his own business.

  The bearded man was narrow-shouldered, pudgy, and looked to Click like a college professor whose mother still dressed him. He seemed to be reading a newspaper, but his eyes didn’t shift around on the page. He was either the world’s slowest reader, or he wasn’t reading at all. Then Click saw that the man was actually looking at the window beside him, using its reflection like a mirror to keep an eye on the woman and the judge.

  Click wondered if the man had noticed him, too.

  The judge got up all the sudden, said his good-bye to the pretty woman, and walked out of the restaurant. Click was only half done eating his nine-dollar hamburger—for which he didn’t even have a bill yet—couldn’t very well get up and take off after the old man without attracting attention. What he did was sit tight, eat the rest of his meal, and watch the woman, who waited a few minutes before she too walked out. That happened just as Click was forking up the last of his french fries.

  As soon as she left, the bearded man set his newspaper aside and left the dining room. Click noticed that the man had signed a ticket too before he got up. So that meant they were both staying at the hotel.

  Click set fifteen dollars on the table by the bill and walked out chewing. He would rather have used a stolen credit card, but that would take too long. As it was, by the time Click made the turns that put him in a position to see the end of the lobby, the woman and the bearded man were getting into separate elevators even though the man clearly had time to get in hers with her. They didn’t look at each other, but the woman did glance at Click. Click was sure they were together when the cabs both stopped at the fourth floor.

  Even though his daddy would be pissed that Click lost track of the judge, the news about the meeting with the stranger should make up for it. His daddy couldn’t get too mad seeing how Click had warned him earlier that very morning that they needed more people to follow the judge right. Peanut had said, “No need to leash a bitch when you have her puppies in a box.”

  Click went outside in the courtyard to use his cell phone. He was right about both things—Peanut was mad that the judge got away, but real interested in the woman and the bearded man.

  “I shoulda known better than to send a child to do a man’s job,” Peanut told Click several times to let him know he meant it. And don’t think Click didn’t know better than to mention the fact that he had told his daddy following somebody wasn’t a one-man job.

  Peanut agreed that, since the bearded man and the pretty woman were both staying at the same hotel on the same floor, but acting like they didn’t know each other, they were up to something. He said they needed watching more than the judge.

  “It’s the damned FBI,” Peanut said.

  “You sure?” Click said. “The man with the beard was goofy looking. He looked like he was supposed to be a college prof in some low-budget porn video.”

  “Feds,” his father told him. “Sure as caged chimps sling balls of monkey dung. All the agents aren’t in slick suits. I need to think on it some.”

  Click knew that the judge had screwed up by defying his father’s orders not to bring in the cops. Watching the judge was pointless now because the jurist was going to be punished exactly as he had been warned. Blood would have to flow or Peanut’s threats would be seen as less than certain.

  Click was ready to leave the hotel. What more could he do? He wanted to go by Best Buy and pick out a few CDs, get some more memory for his Dell laptop because it hung up on his favorite interactive game, Urban Plague, and that lag had gotten him killed the night before. His heart sank when he found out that wasn’t going to happen today.

  “Stick around there and keep your eyes open,” Peanut told him. “Call me if anything happens.”

  “What kind of anything?” Click asked.

  “You’ll know when you see it. Like more cop-looking people coming from and going to her floor.”

  “Daddy, I can’t very well park out on College Street and watch.”

  “Stay inside then. Blend in and keep a sharp eye out.”

  “What the hell do I do to blend in—get a job here?”

  Click snapped the phone shut before his daddy could ream him out and frowned. He looked at the tree growing in a giant pot and at the plants that took up a whole corner of the hotel lobby and imagined himself squatting in the prissy foliage wearing camouflage overalls. Of all the members of the Smoot clan, only Click didn’t hunt. He didn’t like being in the woods, especially after he’d gotten chiggers so bad he’d gone to the emergency room about it. He’d known the nurse was trying hard not to laugh because his privates were swollen up and itched so bad he was crying. He also didn’t like sitting still all day with frozen toes, and once he killed a deer, he had to get really nasty field-dressing it. And his siblings always smeared his face with deer blood even though it was only done when you killed the first buck of your whole life. Peanut, Click’s brothers Buck, Curt, and Burt, and his sister Dixie could have the damned woods all to themselves, as far as Click was concerned.

  Looking around at the ocean of open space punctuated with modern furniture, the polished marble and glass, he tried to figure out just how the hell he was going to manage an act of camouflage.

  8

  With his perfect white hair, bushy brows, his neatly trimmed mustache and perfect nails, attorney Ross Laughlin looked like an actor playing a distinguished senator. He wore a three-thousand-dollar Brioni suit, a three-hundred-dollar custom-made silk dress shirt, an Armani tie and thousand-dollar British shoes sewn especially for his feet. A massive gold signet ring bearing his family crest encircled his ring finger, and a platinum Rolex President wrapped his wrist. The attorney sat on the chilled steel chair and placed his briefcase to his right side on the tabletop, which was marred with graffiti. Popping open the briefcase, he removed the crocodile-skin notebook and opened it. Taking his Faber-Castell ink pen from his inside coat pocket, he uncapped it and started scribbling on the thick paper.

  When Colonel Hunter Bryce was led into the room by two jail guards, Laughlin was busily making notes. Only when the guards exited the room did Laughlin look up at the middle-aged man built like a gladiator in his prime.

  “Colonel,” he said.

  “Ross,” Bryce said, running a hand over the gray stubble on his head.

  Laughlin turned his eyes to look out through the security glass panel, and saw that the guards out in the hallway were not paying any particular attention to the prisoner and his attorney. The room had no audio or video surveillance because it was strictly for client-attorney conferences, which made it every bit as secure as the confessional.

  “Sarnov is in town,” Laughlin told Bryce. “I am meeting with him this afternoon. Max is keeping him company.” Max Randall was Bryce’s right-hand man and his official representative until he was free. Max got Bryce’s orders through Laughlin.

  “Sarnov should be in a good mood,” Bryce observed. “He’s two days away from taking delivery on his merchandise.”

  “I doubt
his mood could be described as good. His employers don’t like being held over a barrel, and after blaming you, I am sure they hold Serge somewhat responsible for the deal.”

  Bryce shrugged. “If they weren’t over that barrel, I would be facing a life sentence, and they would not have a steady supply of the merchandise in the years to come.” As he spoke, Bryce cracked the knuckles on his powerful hands one by one.

  Laughlin kept his expression flat as he scribbled gibberish on the lined paper with his ludicrously expensive pen. “Over a barrel” was a euphemism for the fact that Colonel Bryce had taken a three-million-dollar advance from a consortium of predominantly Russian criminal organizations on a nine-million-dollar total payment for a container of military weaponry. Bryce’s inconvenient arrest for stabbing an undercover agent to death had put the deal in limbo because Colonel Bryce had refused to divulge the location of the weapons to the Russians until he was free of the murder charge. It was a dangerous gambit, but Bryce had always juggled deadly situations like a clown kept tennis balls aloft. The man had nerves of tempered steel.

  “It is a dangerous game you’ve been playing, Hunter,” Laughlin reminded him. “For me, if not for you.”

  “Was playing,” Bryce corrected. “After Monday all will be forgiven and we’ll be slamming back vodkas with them. You’ll forgive me, won’t you, Ross?”

  “Your holding out on Intermat has put me in a very precarious position with good and valued clients,” Laughlin said. “You put me between them and the potential loss of their money, and that is a very dangerous place.”

  “Your past business with them is nothing compared to the deals we will do in the future,” Colonel Bryce said smugly. His eyes radiated total confidence.

  Laughlin had done ten million the past year with Intermat in hijacked cigarettes, more than that in pure grain alcohol furnished by a distillery, and they were expanding into new avenues of revenue. Eventually the Russians would take the whole operation, but by then Laughlin would be ready to retire.