Nemesis: A Jordan Quest FBI Thriller Read online

“What’s this all about?”

  Hallier shook his head as he walked to the elevator. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  Jordan stopped him. “I understand your need for confidentiality, Colonel, I truly do. But these are exceptional circumstances. Maddy is family to me.” She removed the crumpled photograph from her pocket, handed it to Hallier. “The last thing she did before she disappeared was write a note on the back of this picture asking for my help. She knows if anyone can find her, I can.”

  “This goes way beyond family ties, Agent Quest. This is a matter of national security.”

  “I understand,” Jordan pressed. “But you’ve brought me in on matters just as serious as this before. Remember our search for Commander Egan? I led you to him in Costa Rica. You’d never have been able to find him, much less take him into custody without my help.”

  Hallier nodded. “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Then we agree. I’m part of this investigation now. You know my abilities and what I bring to the table. You need me on this, Colonel. More importantly, Maddy needs me.”

  “What about your current cases?” Hallier asked. “Won’t you need approval from your ASAC?”

  “I’ve got plenty of vacation time banked. I’ll inform the Bureau that I’m off the clock as of this minute for personal reasons. Besides, Farrow Industries was my father’s company. I’m still its chairwoman and largest shareholder. I can get you any information you need with a single phone call.”

  “All right. You can stop selling me now. You’re in.”

  Jordan smiled. “I thought you’d see it my way.”

  “How is Madelaine’s husband holding up?”

  “As well as can be expected under the circumstances. He’s scared to death that something terrible has happened to his wife. And from the reading I got from that picture, he may be right.”

  Hallier nodded as they entered the elevator. “I’m afraid you don’t know the half of it.”

  Jordan pressed the third-floor call button. “Are you telling me you knew this was going to happen?” she asked.

  Hallier watched the elevator doors close. “We suspected it might. Unfortunately, they got to Dr. Coltraine before we could.”

  Jordan stared at the Colonel. “Who are they?”

  Hallier said nothing.

  6

  “WE’RE ALMOST THERE,” the woman said to her partner. “Make the call.”

  The man removed his cellphone from his belt, found the number, called it.

  The voice that answered was male, deep, the accent Chinese. “Shi de?”

  “We have her.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Twenty minutes out.”

  “Flash your lights when you arrive. Someone will direct you from there.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Is the package intact?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We’ll be waiting.” The man ended the call.

  “Well?” the woman asked.

  “They’re ready for us.”

  “Perhaps we should check on her,” the man suggested. “Make sure she’s deliverable.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “You gave her too much of the drug.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You used the full syringe. You should have used half. That was reckless.”

  “Do you hear her struggling around back there? Yelling? Kicking? Screaming?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have your answer.”

  “Regardless, you could have killed her.”

  “She’s fine.”

  The man shook his head in frustration. He steered the car over to the shoulder of the road. “I’m not taking any chances.”

  The woman became angry. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The man stopped the car, placed it in park, stared at his partner. “What do you think will happen to us if we arrive at the dock, open the trunk, and Chang finds a dead woman inside? He’ll put a bullet in our heads without blinking an eye, then he’ll put one in hers just for the hell of it. Is that what you want?”

  The woman fumed, stared out the window, then answered sternly. “No.”

  “Neither do I. So, are you going to check on her, or am I?”

  “It was your idea,” she replied sarcastically.

  “Yesu jidu!” the man swore. He removed the QSZ-92 military issued semi-automatic pistol concealed in the small of his back and chambered a round. “Wait here,” he said, his tone more of a demand than a request.

  He popped the trunk, opened the door, and scanned the rarely used roadway. All clear. He held the gun at his side. He would present it to her only as a warning. The woman was far too valuable to be injured or harmed, much less shot. Their mission objective was clear: capture the American scientist, Dr. Madelaine Coltraine, and deliver her to their handlers at the Port of Los Angeles. Others would take it from there. It had been their job to watch her, which they had been doing for months. Staying off the radar of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division’s Foreign Influence Task Force had been the most challenging element of the operation, and they had avoided detection so far. He had been given the cover name Jun Zhang, his partner Yangxing Qin by the Chinese Ministry of State Security; the MSS. Both were deep cover operatives for the secret police agency of the People’s Republic of China. They had lived and worked in the United States for the last four years; he posing as the president of Wing Dong Foods, an Asian noodle importing company, she as his wife and corporate vice president. The company and its ten person staff were a front for their covert operations in America and had offered the perfect cover, permitting them to travel across the country and successfully establish sleeper cells in every major city from Miami to Los Angeles, which had become their base of operations. Beijing had benefited greatly from their intelligence gathering efforts and ability to identify and target the software vulnerabilities of many of the country’s financial services and credit reporting countries. Their data harvest included names, birth dates and social security numbers of over one hundred million Americans. This had been accomplished by reverse-engineering the intellectual property of the companies from whom they had stolen the data. A specially constructed data room hidden in the basement of Wing Dong Foods housed the spies’ sophisticated custom designed computer system and routed the illegally obtained information through dozens of servers in thirty countries using encrypted channels. The attack was a work of cyber-art, invisible to the targeted companies’ threat detection software. Each day, file logs were wiped clean, efficiently eliminating any awareness of their presence or activity within the system. The acquisition of priceless U.S. data, from location and log data to text and photographic metadata, credit card and banking information, and health and patient information, had become the MSS’s stock-in-trade. Hundreds of millions of dollars had been extorted through the malicious placement of ransomware on the computer systems of their corporate targets and the execution of denial-of-service attacks against them. Countless data breaches of supposedly protected information had been accomplished. Zhang and Qin knew the MSS’s main objective was to continue to expose and capitalize upon the gaping cyber holes in American computer systems until none of its citizens was safe from their efforts. The MSS mandate was simple. In ten years, China would own America. The time had come to take their game to the next level. The MSS has set its sights on obtaining the holy grail of cyber counterintelligence. They would infiltrate the computer systems of The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, steal the data behind its most ambitious project to date, Overlord, and abduct the woman in charge of it.

  Zhang approached the rear of the car with caution. All was quiet. The woman was likely still unconscious. Perhaps he had overreacted. The dose of Midazolam Qin had administered would easily have been enough to keep her sedated for the duration of the drive.

  He lifted the trunk lid.

  The woman lay on her side, just as he had left her when h
e had forced her into the trunk and bound her with duct tape. Her back was to him, hands and feet pulled up to her chest. Zhang poked her back with the barrel of his gun.

  Her body failed to respond to being prodded by the weapon.

  Zhang listened. No sound emanated from her. Was she breathing? Was he right, after all? Had Qin given her too much of the drug for her system to handle? Was she dead? He had to know if she was all right. If she was dead, their only course of action would be to dump her body right here on the side of the road and disappear. MSS would send agents after them, of course. But Zhang would rather take his chances living on the run than face being sent home and executed for failing to successfully complete such a critical mission.

  He returned his weapon to his waistband, grabbed the woman by her shoulder, rolled her on to her back, leaned into the truck, and placed his ear against her mouth.

  He hoped to be met with sounds of life.

  What he didn’t expect was the larynx-crushing elbow strike Madelaine delivered to his throat, which left him helpless and gasping for air.

  7

  MADELAINE AND SPENCER’S condominium was now on lockdown. DARPA agents had taken up positions at both the front and rear entrances to the building. Hallier had ordered two of his men to pull the security video from the building’s monitoring system and review the footage. A second team was busy dusting the entrance doors, lobby, and elevator for fingerprints. Spencer accompanied Jordan, Chris, and the colonel to the underground parking lot and directed them to the location of Madelaine’s Porsche.

  “There,” Spencer said. He stood back, pointed to the vehicle. “That’s Maddy’s car. Like I said, the driver’s side window has been shattered.”

  Hallier walked over to the car, removed a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his hand as he inspected the vehicle, careful not to destroy any physical evidence Madelaine’s assailants might have left behind. He called out to Spencer. “Did you touch anything, Mr. Coltraine?”

  Spencer nodded. “I didn’t think it would matter.”

  “It’s all right,” Hallier replied coolly. “I’m sure you were more concerned for your wife’s safety and well-being than you were with contaminating a crime scene.”

  Jordan placed her hand on Spencer’s shoulder. “I know how hard this must be for you, Spencer,” she said. “Think carefully. Did you see or hear anything that seemed out of place? A person? A vehicle?”

  “No. Absolutely nothing.”

  Jordan nodded. “Okay. Try to relax. We’ve got this.”

  Hallier called out to Jordan. “Agent Quest.”

  “Yes, Colonel?”

  “Take a look at this.”

  Jordan walked to the car, peered inside. Hallier pointed to two red specks on the driver’s headrest. “Does this look like blood droplets to you?”

  Jordan nodded.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “I am,” Jordan replied. “That came from a needle. Someone jabbed Maddy in the neck, probably drugged her, then took her.”

  Hallier examined the floor of the parking garage behind the car. “Here. Tire tracks.” The impression made in the thin layer of dust on the asphalt was faint but distinctive. “Check out the position.”

  Jordan examined the tracks. “They’re too close to the back of the car. It’s a one-way parking garage. Normal driving behavior would place a vehicle exiting the lot several feet away from the back of Maddy’s car, in the middle of the lane, not a foot behind it. Someone pulled up and stopped right here.”

  “Another vehicle.”

  Jordan nodded. “They removed Maddy from her car, put her in theirs, then left.”

  “This is a secure building,” Hallier said. “Public parking is restricted to the first floor. You’d need a key card or gate opener to access the tenant parking area on these lower levels.”

  Jordan looked inside the car, lowered the sun visor, pointed to the faint indentation line in the visor. “They took her gate opener. That’s how they got in and out of the garage.”

  The men Hallier had assigned to review the parking garage security footage approached the car. “Sir, we found something.”

  “Show me,” Hallier said.

  The video footage had been transferred to the DARPA agent’s laptop. Hallier and Jordan watched as a man and a woman, both of Asian descent, approached Maddy in her car, broke the window, and incapacitated her with the injection.

  “There,” Hallier said. He watched as the woman tossed the man the remote control. “You were right. That’s how they gained access to the garage.” The footage showed the woman waiting while the man left. He appeared a minute later behind the wheel of a Mercedes sedan, popped the trunk, and exited the vehicle. Together they deposited an unconscious Madelaine into the trunk of the car, closed the lid, and drove off.

  “Wait,” Jordan said to the agent. “Run the video back a few seconds.”

  The agent reversed the footage. “Say when.”

  Jordan waited. “There.”

  Hallier noticed it too. “Sonofabitch. Diplomatic plates.”

  “Think we’ll get anywhere if we run them?”

  “We’ll try. But foreign embassies are notorious for not cooperating with the military, no matter how desperate the situation.”

  The agent interrupted. “Sir, there’s more. The exit camera caught pretty clear images of both the driver and passenger.”

  “Let’s see.”

  The agent advanced the video. “Gotcha,” Hallier said. “Get that footage to Tech Ops right away,” he instructed the men. “Tell them to run facial recognition on those two. I want to know who they are the second their identities have been confirmed.”

  “Copy that, sir.” The agent closed the computer lid and hurried to his vehicle.

  “Think they’ll be in the system?” Jordan asked.

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “Maddy’s life depends on it.”

  “Agreed.”

  Jordan knelt, picked up the fragments of shattered glass that had fallen from the broken window, let them sift through her fingers, then stood. She placed her hand on the driver’s seat and concentrated, then waited for the vision to present itself.

  The injection…

  Maddy struggling against the effects of the drug to remain conscious…

  The last words Maddy heard… ‘Call the ship… tell them we have the cargo.’

  The psychic vision ended.

  Jordan turned to Hallier. “I think I know where they’ve taken her. We need to leave right now.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  8

  MADELAINE HAD USED every ounce of her strength to drive her elbow deep into the man’s throat as he turned her over. He fell on top of her in the confined space. His decision to roll her on to her back to check on her had given her the finite window of opportunity she needed to deliver the incapacitating blow, grab him by his jacket collar, then catch him before he fell to the ground. She eased him down to his knees, let go, then watched as he slumped to the ground and landed on his side, clutching his damaged throat, trying to suck life-giving oxygen back into his lungs.

  The woman was still in the car. She had turned on the music while she waited for her partner. The thump-thump-thump of the bass beat provided the cover Madelaine needed. She would not have heard the commotion. The attack had been silent. Still, Maddy knew she would be a difficult adversary to contend with. She’d caught a glimpse of her in the Porsche’s side mirror before she had injected her. Athletic build. Strong. Wiry. Very fast. She would need to get away from her as quickly as possible. Growing up as the daughter of a Navy SEAL, her father had taught her the basics of self-defense. The rest she had learned from the Krav Maga instructors on the naval base. She’d never had to use her training before, and certainly not in a life-and-death situation such as this. In this moment, she knew her father would have been proud of her for how she had handled herself.


  Her foot found purchase on the ground as she crept out of the trunk, attempting to keep as much of her weight as possible still in the car. Any sudden displacement would cause the back end of the vehicle to lift, which might arouse the suspicion of the woman in the front seat. She did not want to have to deal with the two of them at once. She was still groggy from the medication. What her attackers didn’t know about her was that she was one of those rare individuals upon whom sedatives had a reduced affect She had been hospitalized twice in her life. In both cases, the anesthesiologist had warned the surgical team that she was reaching the point of oversedation. Her abductors had injected her with enough of the drug to put a person of average tolerance under for hours. However, in Madelaine’s case, the effect had been minimal. She had felt sleepy for some time but had never been rendered fully unconscious by the drug.

  The man at her feet stirred. Madelaine jammed the blade of her foot into his throat, forcing his head to the side, then applied direct pressure against his carotid artery. He clutched at her foot, tried to pull it free. Madelaine responded by applying more pressure, all the while staring through the narrow gap in the open trunk lid, keeping an eye on the woman in the passenger seat. The man soon gave up the fight. His hands fell away from her foot, his arms slumped to the ground. He was now fully unconscious.

  Now or never.

  Madelaine dropped to the ground and began rifling through the man’s clothing, scavenging anything of value she could retrieve from her assailant. She removed his cellphone from his belt, slipped it into her pocket, then ran her hands over his body and down his pant legs, searching him for weapons. She relieved him of the combat knife holstered to his calf, then rolled him over, found the handgun lying under his body where he had fallen, and slipped it into her jeans at the small of her back.

  She heard the woman call out from inside the car. “Zhang! Gankuai!”

  Madelaine did not understand the words she had said, but her tone implied impatience. Either she was demanding her partner hurry up or she was inquiring why he was taking so long to check on the status of their prisoner.