Nemesis: A Jordan Quest FBI Thriller Read online

  NEMESIS

  JORDAN QUEST FBI THRILLER SERIES BOOK 6

  Gary Winston Brown

  Read the Series Prequel: JORDAN QUEST

  Have you read Jordan’s backstory? You can get it here!

  A tragic accident brings with it an incredible gift. But is the price too high?

  When a young Jordan Quest is discovered lying on the bottom of the pool at her family’s stately mansion she is pulled out of the water and pronounced “vital signs absent” by the attending paramedics.

  Unwilling to give up on the girl, Jordan is rushed to the hospital in a desperate attempt to revive her. Teetering on the brink of death, aware of her surroundings but unable to communicate with the trauma team working frantically to save her life, a strange and mysterious presence makes itself known. In that moment, Jordan’s life is changed forever.

  She calls it The Gift, and her newly discovered abilities will have a profound influence on the world’s understanding of psychic phenomenon. Hers is now the voice of the dead. And law enforcement is listening.

  In helping the authorities locate and bring to justice killers who have long evaded capture, Jordan soon discovers an unsettling truth: Is her astounding ability really a gift? Or is it a curse that brings with it unimaginable consequences.

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  “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

  Albert Einstein

  Contents

  Read the Series Prequel: JORDAN QUEST

  Become a VIP!

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Also by Gary Winston Brown

  About the Author

  1

  THREE.

  That was the number of times Madelaine Coltraine had seen the car within the last few days. The first was when she had left Harridan’s Fine Foods. She sensed they had been watching her, the Asian couple, a man and a woman, seated in the black Mercedes S-Class sedan with diplomatic plates. They diverted their gazes away from her when she looked at them. The same vehicle and its occupants had parked in the lot across the street from her gym yesterday morning. When she drove home from work later that evening, something felt wrong. On leaving the parking lot of Farrow Industries, she once again found herself in the company of the black Mercedes. Madelaine began to panic and followed the emergency instructions recommended to her by Farrow’s security personnel. She turned at the next street, purposefully diverting from her normal route home, watched, and waited. The sedan took the turn, stayed with her. When she was forced to stop for a red light, the car sped up, drove around her at speed, and disappeared into traffic. The situation had unnerved her. She sat behind the wheel for a moment, waiting for her pounding heart to resume its normal steady beat, then proceeded home. She had tried to shake off the fear, told herself she was overreacting, that there was nothing to be concerned about. Now, looking down from the fourth-floor window of her condominium, she was genuinely afraid. The Mercedes had returned. This time, the car was parked down the street, its presence revealed under the harsh glare of a sodium-vapor streetlamp. She could make out the occupants. A man and a woman. Both Asian.

  There was no denying it anymore. She was being followed.

  A computational mathematics prodigy, Madelaine had received her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the tender age of twenty-two. Farrow Industries recruited her immediately. Ten years later, she was placed in charge of Project Overlord, the company’s newest artificial intelligence and machine learning division, and tasked with the responsibility of taking the DARPA-funded project from the whiteboard to the field in two years. The company had allowed her to hand pick her scientific team. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the project, gave her a one-hundred-million-dollar budget to use as she saw fit to bring Overlord to life. Word of her prestigious appointment had spread like wildfire throughout the scientific community. Under her guidance, DARPA’s race to dominate artificial intelligence for military field use was on, with Madelaine leading the technological charge. Although the responsibility on her shoulders was immense, she had already proven herself up to the task.

  She had been warned of the potential dangers that could come from her new appointment. Farrow Industries attorneys had taken out a kidnap and ransom insurance policy on her life, and their in-house security experts had devised an emergency plan which she was to follow if ever she suspected her life might be in danger. It had all seemed very over the top at the time, the stuff of spy movies. Madelaine was a gifted academic and scientific genius. She had never thought of herself as an important person. Now she was. When Farrow Industries had offered her the position, she accepted it immediately. For her and her husband, Spencer, the new appointment and all the perks that came with it had been life changing. It had given them everything they had ever wanted and more. But at this moment, none of that mattered. Right now, the security warnings had become real. She feared for their lives.

  Madelaine parted the blinds and watched as the male driver exited the car, followed by the passenger. The two looked up, saw her, then hurried towards the building.

  Fear informed Madelaine what was happening.

  Intuition told her they were coming.

  For her.

  The escape plan.

  The security experts insisted she keep a ‘go’ bag packed and at the ready if ever she needed to leave at a moment’s notice. They had provided her with the address of a company safe house on the outskirts of Los Angeles, which was manned 24/7 by Farrow Industries armed security personnel, and a number to call. If there was time, she was to call the number, then wait for an extraction team to come for her. Together, they would travel to the safe house. However, if the situation seemed desperate and time was of the essence, she was to get there on her own as quickly as possible.

  Spencer too worked for Farrow Industries and would be arriving home at any minute. If this situation was what she suspected, that the man and woman from the Mercedes were coming to kidnap her, she had to leave now before it was too late. If Spencer arrived while they were here, they might kill him. She was not about to allow that to hap
pen. It was her they wanted, not him. There was no time to wait for an extraction. She had to leave. Now.

  Madelaine ran into the study, snatched a framed wedding picture from the bookshelf, pulled off the backing, removed the photo, grabbed a pen, scribbled a note on the back, then raced into the bedroom. Spencer’s jeans lay neatly folded on the bed. She tossed the empty frame onto the comforter, crumpled the photo, shoved it into the front pocket of his jeans, threw them on the floor, grabbed her go bag out of the bedroom closet, raced out the front door to the stairs, broke through the fire door and descended the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time until she reached the parking garage. Stopping for a moment to catch her breath, she cracked open the door and peered into the parking area.

  Clear.

  Madelaine clicked the door opener on her key fob and raced across the parking lot to her Porsche Carrera, threw open the door, and jumped inside.

  Perhaps there was still time to call Farrow Industries Security, inform them of her situation and location, and remain in the car until they arrived.

  She opened her purse, pulled out her phone, checked the display.

  No signal.

  The thick ceiling and concrete walls of the underground garage blocked both cellular reception and transmission capabilities entirely.

  She had no choice but to get to the safe house on her own.

  She started the car, checked her mirror, then screamed.

  The woman from the Mercedes stood beside her door.

  Before she could put the vehicle into gear, the driver’s side window suddenly imploded. Shards of broken safety glass rained down on her. She turned her head to avoid the assault, then felt the sharp pain of a needle as it plunged into her neck. She tried to look up at her assailant but collapsed. The drug had already taken effect. As the woman opened the door, Madelaine’s limp body fell into her arms.

  The woman pushed Madelaine back into her seat, sat her upright, unclipped the electronic parking garage door opener from the visor, then spoke to her partner. Her accent was heavy, Chinese. “I’ll stay with her,” she said. She tossed the man the remote. “Take this. Get the car. Bring it here.”

  “Check her phone,” the man insisted. “See if she called anyone.”

  Madelaine had dropped the phone during the attack. The woman recovered it from the floor of the vehicle, grabbed her hand, pressed her thumb against the Home button. The phone unlocked.

  “No service,” she said. She threw it down.

  “We should go upstairs,” the man suggested. “Check the landline in the condo.”

  “There’s no time. We need to move. Call the ship. Tell them we have the cargo.”

  “All right.”

  The woman placed her finger against Madelaine’s carotid artery, checked her pulse. Strong, steady. “The Midazolam will keep her under for hours,” she said. “By the time she comes around we’ll be in international waters.”

  “Which is where we’ll make the transfer,” the man said.

  2

  “MADDY,” SPENCER CALLED out as he entered the condominium apartment. “You home, babe?”

  No reply.

  He set the bouquet of red roses he had bought for his wife on the kitchen counter, together with the celebratory bottle of Promontory Cabernet Sauvignon to be enjoyed later that evening. Madelaine loved it whenever he surprised her with flowers for no reason other than a simple show of affection. However, this was a special occasion. Today was their fifth wedding anniversary. To celebrate, Spencer had pulled out all the stops. The flowers and wine were just the start. Dinner reservations had been booked at Bellamy’s, their favorite restaurant, and he had reserved the private function room in the back for their exclusive use. Jean-Yves, the owner, had promised they would appoint it precisely to Spencer’s specifications, with rose petals scattered over the floor and across the white silk tablecloth and dozens of tea light candles illuminating the room. The ambiance was to be subdued, warm, romantic. For the pièce de résistance, he had booked the same three-piece violin, viola and cello string ensemble that had played at Bellamy’s six years ago on the night he had proposed to his wife. He had reached out, found the musician’s, reminded them of how perfect their contribution to their special evening had been and was overjoyed when they agreed to perform exclusively for them tonight.

  “Maddy? Hon?”

  Spencer stopped, listened. The two-story condo was silent. Perhaps Maddy was upstairs soaking in the bath after a long day in the lab, earbuds in, listening to one of her favorite podcasts or an audiobook, as was her usual post-work routine. She had called him before she’d left Farrow for the evening, told him she’d meet him at home and how much she was looking forward to spending their evening together. For the past two weeks, their work schedules had been intense. She was overseeing the latest battery of tests on Project Overlord while he had been managing his division’s progress on Farrow’s next generation of miniaturized military GPS tracking systems. They both agreed they needed to book off a few hours at the end of the day. Each loved their job and found it easy to get lost in their work and getting home late in the evening had recently become the norm. But they had made a pact. They would take off one night each year when they would make each other the priority. That night was their anniversary, and tonight was that night.

  Spencer glanced across the room, saw Madelaine’s computer sitting on the couch, lid open. Strange. Maddy never left her work computer unattended. It was the property of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, not her personal PC, and contained Top Secret, Secret, or Confidential information. If the keyboard remained inactive for more than three minutes or the specially designed screen sensed she was not physically sitting in front of the device, the machines biometric facial recognition, fingerprint, and voiceprint verification fail safes would be activated, shut her out of the system, and require her to confirm her identity before she could log back in. Now, the elliptical DARPA logo stared back from the center of the screen. Too late, he remembered his wife’s warning never to touch the computer. The second the device failed to identify his biomarkers, the screen went black. The machine shut down.

  Shit.

  Maddy had warned him what would happen if the system’s security safeguards ever detected it someone had tried to compromise it. First, DARPA would determine the device’s physical location via its military-encrypted GPS marker, then attempt to contact her to verify that the property was indeed still in her possession and secure. If they could not reach her immediately, they would dispatch a security team to recover the machine and arrest whoever had it in their possession. Spencer knew it was only a matter of minutes before the DARPA agents would show up at his door. He needed to notify Maddy of his mistake right away.

  He ran upstairs to the ensuite bath in the master bedroom, expecting to find Maddy soaking peacefully beneath a generous blanket of soapy bubbles. Instead, he found the room empty.

  Something was wrong. Spencer began to worry. This behavior was not typical of Madelaine. They still acted like teenagers. He would text her periodically for no other reason than to remind her she was in his thoughts. She would return the gesture by sending him a string of heart-shaped emoticons. Then there were the sticky notes left on the refrigerator, always signed Love, Me, followed by an arrow-pierced heart.

  He sensed a change in the room’s energy. The air somehow felt different, heavier.

  He took out his phone and called Madelaine’s number. The call rang through to voicemail.

  Spencer struggled to determine a logical explanation for his wife’s absence. Perhaps she had simply stepped out for a few minutes. But that made little sense. She would never leave the DARPA computer sitting unattended on the couch, an offense that would cause her immediate termination from the organization. Farrow had even gone to the extent of installing a wall safe in the condo in which Maddy was required to store the PC when she was not at home or the device not in use. She was a stickler for protocol and followed it to the lette
r. No, that wasn’t it.

  He opened his phone again, tapped the Friend Finder app, and waited for the software to locate Madelaine’s phone.

  Nothing. No activity.

  Where the hell was she?

  Spencer searched the condo for his wife. “Maddy? Maddy? Where are you?”

  The parking garage.

  The condo could not accommodate their request for side-by-side parking spaces. As a result, his parking space was on the second level. Maddy’s was on the third.

  Spencer raced out of the apartment, ran down the hallway to the elevator, pressed the call button, waited for the car to arrive, rode it down to P3, pushed his way through the doors as they parted, raced around the corner, reached Maddy’s car, then felt the blood drain from his face at the sight. He stopped dead in his tracks.

  The side window of Maddy’s Porsche had been smashed in; the door left open. Pieces of broken glass lay scattered on the ground.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Spencer said. He ran to the car, looked inside. Madelaine’s phone lay on the floor of the driver’s compartment.