Los Angeles
Ian McBride’s life had spiraled into the shitter. The FBI had shoved him into the back of a windowless van full of surveillance gear, guarded by two of their men. If he had any doubts the cards were stacked against him, he’d be a fool.
He hated what he’d done to his partner Valentine, but he couldn’t make anything right with him, not after Mateo ordered Brax’s fiancée killed. Ian hadn’t made that decision, but he knew what the crime boss intended to do with the information he’d given him about the train rendezvous between Valentine and his girl.
Ian avoided looking into the eyes of the men in the van. The faces of the FBI agents were grim until one of them spoke.
“We know about you and Mateo De La Cruz. Don’t bother to lie to us.”
Ian heaved a sigh.
“Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights and let me call my lawyer?”
“After I tell you why we picked you up, you won’t care about that.”
The man had his interest.
“What are you talking about?”
“Braxton Valentine is right about the cartel shifting gears. Whatever you thought would happen? All bets are off. Your son’s school issued an Amber alert. He’s missing.”
Ian’s throat clenched. No, please no.
“Why didn’t they call me?” His voice quaked.
“Check your phone.” The agent glared straight through him. “They may’ve tried.”
“My phone is in my gym bag. I wasn’t expecting a call that time of day.” He twisted around to remind the man that he had his hands tied. “Cut me loose. I’ll check it.”
“Not gonna happen.” The Fed nudged his head to his partner. “Grab his cell and search his voice messages.”
The other man reached into his gym bag, looking for his cell. He ham-handed the phone and thumbed through voice mail until he found what he searched for. The agent hit the play button and the voice of a nervous woman filled the cargo hold of the van.
“Mr. McBride, I’m s-sorry to inform you…your son is missing. One of the teachers said they saw two men grab him before he came into the school. We called the police as fast as we could, but we couldn’t stop them. Please…c-call the principal’s office. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, God. My boy. This can’t be happening.”
“We’ll find your son, but you have to give us something.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“Do you really want a debate?” The agent smirked. “Or is finding your son more important?”
Ian couldn’t get his head wrapped around his predicament, not with his child in danger.
“What do you want?” He’d do anything to protect his boy. Hell, he already had.
“We know you have a contact within Mateo De La Cruz’s cartel. Give us that number and we’ll place the call and listen in. You have one chance to get this right. Make the call.”
The agent told him they would trace whatever call he made. They’d follow the bread crumbs of contacts until they finally reached the physical location of Mateo himself. Ian knew that with the resources of the federal government at the FBI’s disposal, they could track down the crime boss no matter how deep of a hole he’d slithered into and the Feds would coerce the man into giving up his hostage. His little boy had to be very scared.
Ian didn’t see a choice. He had to make the call.
With his head hung low, he gave the FBI agents his contact number for Mateo De La Cruz. He would tip another domino that would lead to his life being over, but nothing he did would be worse than the thirty pieces of silver he’d taken by swapping his son’s life for Raine Garrett’s.
***
Los Angeles
An hour later
Mia Romeo paced the floor of her hotel room with Faith Halloran keeping her company as she waited for the Phoenix team to return. From the comfort of her apartment in San Antonio, Kat Culhane had shared images of her remote viewing through the Lotus Circle with Mia and Faith, but a vision would never be the same as boots on the ground.
Mia didn’t have to wait for word. Dan Romeo used his card key to enter the hotel room and he had the others with him.
“What happened?” she asked. “How did it go?”
“Like clockwork…if you don’t count Valentine’s gambit,” Mike D’Antoni said as he took off his FBI windbreaker. “He’s full of surprises and none of them good.”
Dan, Mike and Mark Halloran filled Mia and Faith in on what had happened. They had heard what was said between Valentine and Ian McBride, enough to know Brax believed his partner had betrayed him and gotten Raine killed.
Mia’s stomach clenched. That must’ve pushed Valentine over the edge.
“McBride is safe and sound,” Dan said. “He still doesn’t know what hit him, but he will.”
Ian McBride had been incarcerated at a safe house the Phoenix Agency had acquired in Los Angeles, using law enforcement contacts to hold him for questioning. McBride had assumed the safe house measure had been for his own safety and that his son would be brought to him once they rescued the kid, but that would never happen.
The abduction had been an elaborate hoax set up by the Phoenix Agency.
Mia hated to trick a worried father, but the man deserved the subterfuge, after what he’d done to Raine and Brax.
Once they had McBride in the van, D’Antoni had counted on him being unable to operate his phone, because of his hands being tied behind his back. Dan and Mike devised a plan to trick their ‘mark’ and explained it to Mia and Faith.
Since they didn’t know what type of device the man carried—and McBride would recognize his own cell if he saw it—Mike came up with a ‘sleight of hand’ maneuver like a magician. When he dug into McBride’s gym bag and pretended to retrieve his cell, he’d only palmed another phone with his large hands to conceal it.
Once the recorded message played, McBride had been drawn in. What father wouldn’t be worried for his boy? Mia shook her head, imagining the man’s panic.
Mike had played the school’s voice message without showing him the phone. The cell with the prerecorded message had been a burner with Faith Halloran’s voice, pretending to be a school administrator. If the man searched his real phone, he would never find the message from his son’s elementary school—and the amber alert didn’t exist.
In truth, Ian’s boy had been safe at his school, and would be in his nanny’s care when school ended. No one had abducted him. The ruse had been part of the Phoenix Agency’s scheme to coerce cooperation from a savvy CIA operative too compromised over his son’s well-being. Phoenix never had to resort to breaking the law to force McBride to do anything.
They merely orchestrated the deception and McBride bought it.
“It’s too bad we couldn’t convince Valentine to drop his weapon and come in for questioning,” Dan said as he shrugged out of his Kevlar vest. “We could’ve told him the truth and worked him into our tactics to take down Mateo.”
“Why did he go with the cartel when he knows they’ll kill him?” Mia asked her husband.
“He’s beyond caring, honey.” Dan touched her face. “If we had forced him to come with us, he might’ve been desperate enough to start shooting. I might’ve trusted Brax to miss, but not Mateo’s men. Valentine knew we wouldn’t risk a shoot out in a public garage.”
“It’s hard to imagine the kind of grief that would drive him to risk his life for revenge,” Faith said. “He’s going into the demon’s den. Do you think he cares if he walks away?”
“We’ll care for him,” Mark said. “McBride contacted a law firm associated with the cartel. We’ve got eyes on the man he called. We hacked his phone to monitor his calls and track him by GPS. Mike has arranged for our helo in Maryland to be relocated here.”
“We’re ready to move in the sky and on the ground once we get a location from Mark that looks promising,” Dan said. “Mateo sent his men to pick up Valentine, alive. That means el jefe is here in L.A. We’re close. Real close.”
The Phoenix men had tossed their fake FBI gear onto one of the beds to pack up. They had a collection of apparel and resources at their disposal to pull off many types of deceptions.
“Do you think he’s still alive?” No one answered, but Mia didn’t need anyone’s opinion.
She felt Valentine’s life force, but a mounting headache filled her with dread. Would she know if he died?
***
Valentine opened his eyes to utter darkness. He searched for light, but found none.
When he raised his head, a sharp, brutal agony trenched down his spine and the smell of blood leached into his nostrils. The thick stench of mineral water would’ve masked the coppery scent of blood if it hadn’t been under his nose from his busted lip—and he remembered how he’d been hurt.
He’d willingly gotten in the car of the cartel and thought the men would take him to Mateo, but that didn’t happen. Why? He wracked his brain for anything that would tell him where they’d taken him. The last road signs he remembered seeing before he lost consciousness was for the Angeles National Forest and Altadena, California, east of L.A.
After he saw the highway signs, a pang of grief seized him when he recognized the San Gabriel Mountains. No beating could hurt him more than realizing where he was. Losing consciousness had been a merciful blessing after that.
Raine had promised to take him hiking in the San Gabriel range. She had wanted to explore the abandoned gold mines with him, the deserted shafts that dappled the rocky terrain of the challenging hiking trails.
The irony that she had something to do with how he’d ended up in an abandoned mine shaft in the San Gabriels hadn’t been lost on him. Missing Raine hurt worse than any torture Mateo De La Cruz could inflict on his body.
“Is anyone here?” He called out and only heard the echo of his voice bouncing off a vast emptiness. Wherever he was, the cavern had to be immense.
His arms ached and his hands had grown numb. When he stretched to ease his pain, he heard a clank of metal on stone and felt the iron shackles on his wrists. His hands were hung over his head, suspended by a chain and manacles were on his legs. When he moved to get comfortable, an unforgiving surface of rock pressed against his back and spine and he shivered from the cold. His clothes were drenched.
Unable to see, he shut his eyes in desperation and listened. Brax heard an erratic trickle of water closest to him, but an ominous rumble echoed in the distance. With the sound reverberating, he got a sense of the empty chasm around him and the swelling noise formed an image in his mind—a waterfall.
A waterfall made a good landmark if he became desperate enough to mentally reach out to Mia. He didn’t know her enough to trust her. She could ruin his chance at Mateo, but anything he learned of his surroundings might help him.
With his fingertips, he touched jagged stone and felt the chilling water that trickled from the porous rocks near him. He cupped his hands and filled them with enough water to moisten his lips and sip. As time wore on, he shoved his boots as far as he could stretch. One leg dropped off a ledge and his stomach lurched. He hadn’t expected the drop-off.
Blind as he was without any light, he had to be more careful.
Time dragged on as he fought the mounting numbness in his body. The eerie noise of creatures scurrying over stone in the darkness had kept the incessant dripping of water from driving him crazy.
What if Mateo had ordered his men to bury him alive in a cave where no one would find him? Without food, trapped in the cave’s chill in dank clothing, he could die of exposure, fighting the slow death of hypothermia. Everything he had done would’ve been for nothing—and Mateo would get away with murdering Raine.
When that realization hit him, Brax let his anger well from deep in his belly until he let it out.
“Fuck you, Mateo! You’re a coward!” Cursing until his throat ached, he tugged at the chains that held him.
With darkness as his prison and chained to stone, Valentine would have only his punishing regrets to fill his mind.
If Mateo’s men didn’t come back, he would die here.
***
Los Angeles
Days later
For every hour that dragged by without Mia sensing Braxton Valentine, her mind obsessed over him. She thought of little else. Yesterday she’d boosted her abilities with the help of the Lotus Circle, but she came up empty and her restless nights had left her exhausted.
Her dreams had been filled with visions of him—torturous flashes of Valentine in trouble—with murky glimpses of him drowning in a vat of inky shadows. Seeing him in danger made her feel his peril as if her life was in jeopardy.
But in a sudden and unexpected change, Valentine shocked her.
Out of the blue, he sent visions of something else entirely. She fought the images and tried blocking them out until she realized she would be powerless against whatever he intended her to see. Mia’s face blushed with heat as he filled her mind with the intimacy he had shared with Raine, the first time they had made love.
Oh, come on. Not fair.
Mia had no idea why Valentine had sent her a dream of he and Raine in bed, but it had to be deliberate because she couldn’t shake the vision. It wasn’t a hallucination she could wake up from. She couldn’t be sure the images had been their first time together, but with the flood of intimacy, Mia sensed what had been in his heart and she just knew.
What the hell…? How does this help me find you?
No matter how much she pleaded to him in her mind, the one-way vision didn’t stop.
Valentine pleasured Raine’s body with his mouth and his tongue, the way any woman would want to be loved by a man. Mia felt like a voyeur, but she couldn’t stop seeing the way their bodies writhed in the dark, with their gasps and moans escalating to a fevered pitch as Valentine thrust into her.
The heat of their passion welled inside Mia and her body reacted.
When she took out her frustrated desires on her husband and became the aggressor, Dan didn’t object, but Mia felt as if she had two lovers with Valentine in her head. What the hell was happening to her?
She couldn’t explain the puzzle of her dreams, from fearful visions of his life in danger to private moments between Valentine and Raine that made her feel the magnitude of their love and the futility of his revenge that wouldn’t bring her back.
Through it all, Mia sensed him getting weaker and that bothered her most.
Once more her mind filled with doubts and she wondered if he had died, but she refused to dwell on giving up on him. That felt like a betrayal after she’d witnessed the worst day of his life. If he had died, Mia had grown certain she would’ve felt his passing, but not knowing anything had turned her into an irrational bundle of nerves.
When she heard a knock, Mia appreciated the interruption and opened her hotel door. Faith didn’t bother with a greeting. She entered the room, talking.
“I spoke to Kat. She’s still not picking up anything on Valentine. I know it’s not good news, but do you have any other ideas on what we can try next?”
With Kat being a remote viewer, Mia knew they had put their best psychic on tracking down Valentine wherever he might be. Law enforcement around the country used Kat’s gift to locate missing people. So far she had nothing, but Kat’s inability to ‘see’ him could be related to Valentine’s mental defenses.
“Dan and Mike are working with Andy and pushing to get a dossier on el jefe, something that focuses on the latest news about him,” Mia said. “It hasn’t been easy, but Dan thinks they’re on to something.”
Faith locked eyes with her and nodded.
“Okay, that sounds promising. Anything else?”
Wracking her brain, Mia walked toward the window that had a view of downtown Los Angeles. She closed her eyes for an instant and let her mind go. She trusted her instincts and let her brain work. When an image came to her—of Brax holding Raine in his arms on the train after she’d died—Mia remembered something she had done, something she thought would be of value later.
“Have you ever made a tickler file in your head…of visual things you wanted to remember?”
“What are you saying?”
“Just now I let my mind free wheel to wherever it wanted to go. I flashed on Valentine as he held his dead fiancée on the train. It broke my heart, because I didn’t know what to do for him, then or now. But at the time, I did something I thought might pay off later.”
“Did what? You’ve got my attention, Mia.”
“I made a mental note of all the faces standing around them, the people on the train that day. I don’t know why I did it or even that I could actually recall them later, but they’ve been coming to me in my sleep over these last two days. They were like a mind itch I couldn’t scratch…until now.”
On the train, Mia had followed her instincts and ‘saved’ mental images of the people on the train as if she were cataloging priceless art. At the time she felt like a thief, stealing something that didn’t belong to her, but what she’d done might hold importance.
Before Mia explained what she meant to Faith, a card key slipped into the lock of her hotel room and her husband Dan came in with Mike D’Antoni.
“Put a pin in that thought,” Faith said. “We’re not done with your mind itch.”
Mia smiled.
“Here’s what Andy dug up so far on Mateo De La Cruz. It’s not much. The man is averse to being in front of the camera,” Dan said as he handed a stack of papers to Mike. “Andy did a lot of digging through official documents and hacking into government records. When he couldn’t find much on him, he shifted his focus to his inner circle and known associates. Andy thought it might help Mark track leads to a physical location for Mateo, coming from another angle.”
Mike stepped toward the bed and spread their research on the mattress—printed documents of governmental records, newspaper clippings, and photos. When Mia spotted a familiar face, she grabbed an article and stared at an image. She closed her eyes and pictured the face she’d filed away in her mind and reopened her eyes to confirm what she already knew.
“I’ve seen this man’s face before,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Where?” Dan asked. “How could you—?”
Mia didn’t let her husband finish.
“On the train…the day Raine Garrett died. He stood over Valentine as he—”
She couldn’t finish. Her throat tightened with emotion at the sad image she couldn’t get out of her mind.
Mike shook his head.
“Sorry, Mia. That couldn’t possibly be him.”
“Why? I know what I saw,” she insisted. “I have a mental image in my mind right now. I’m not wrong.”
“He’s definitely one of Mateo’s inner circle guys, according to Andy and the Dragon, but you couldn’t have seen him, Mia,” Mike said as he pointed to the picture she held in her hand. “We think he’s the reason el jefe is after Valentine. That man died four months ago.”