Rachel Lee - The Hunted

The black SUV was new, not the same one she’d come here in. The leather was baby smooth under her fingers as she climbed into the backseat. He got in front and pushed a button, and a little screen came down out of the roof. “Movie?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

He put a DVD into the dashboard player, and moments later the screen flickered to life. Bugs Bunny, speaking in Spanish. He’d bought the DVD for a child. Maybe a daughter. Maybe she was sitting where this man’s daughter usually sat, watching the same cartoons his daughter would laugh at while he drove her…where? To school? To church?

She realized she knew nothing about this man. And that was probably why he was letting her go home. He was just another businessman in a foreign country. She didn’t even know what city she was in. She couldn’t identify him.

She fought the urge to look around as they drove. Part of her wanted to memorize everything, to pick out some sign, some landmark, that she could recall when she got home and tell…someone. Someone who could come and find this man. Instead, she just watched Bugs Bunny make a fool of Elmer Fudd. In Spanish.

They were climbing into the mountains. The man must have an airstrip up here somewhere. That would make sense. He could hardly put her on a commercial flight. She would probably be sitting atop a pile of cocaine. She wondered if it would be soft.

“We stop here to pee,” he said, pulling off onto a side road. “More hours to the airport.”

She didn’t need to pee, but that was fine. She was used to peeing on command. When Dad had taken the family to Yellowstone, he’d scheduled in every pee stop, a little X in yellow highlighter on his trip planner. She and her brother had giggled because Dad had used yellow for the pee stops. The thought made her smile.

There wasn’t a bathroom. That was fine. Living on the streets had taught her the more basic skills of life. She pulled down her jeans, carefully tucking the fabric back between her ankles, turning her hips forward as she squatted, pressing a finger on either side of her urethra and lifting, so she would shoot out rather than straight down, keeping her jeans dry.

She heard the schlick-schlick as he worked the slide, and she knew. Part of her thought about trying to run or turning to fight. But her jeans were around her ankles. There wouldn’t be time. It wouldn’t matter.

Fuck it.

Instead, she looked down at the leaves rippling under her stream, at how they flicked this way and that, and just waited. Her throat caught as she thought about Yellowstone, and she and her brother giggling at a yellow X. Back when she had been someone else. Someone innocent and soft and hopeful.

She heard the crack an instant before the bullet crashed through the base of her skull and exploded every thought, every memory, every sadness, every hope.

The blackness came fast.

She was home.

Special Agent Jerrod Westlake sat at his desk in the FBI’s Austin office, looking out a window at the late-afternoon sky. The ordinarily exquisite February weather was about to give way to one of those window-rattling, tree-toppling thunderstorms for which Texas was known.

He watched the clouds turn blacker by the second over toward Balcones. If it had been raining up in the hill country to the west, floods wouldn’t be far behind.

But Jerrod wasn’t really thinking about the storm. At thirty-eight, he had a decade under his belt as an agent, and he looked at the building storm with the uneasy sixth sense that life was about to imitate meteorology.

The case file that lay all over his desk, sorted into types and sources of information, screamed things that burned into his brain. Fourteen-year-old runaway female, last seen hawking herself on the streets of Houston. This time, unlike most times, she had been reported missing by another prostitute, an older woman who had tried to take the child under her wing and protect her. It was this woman who had reported the girl’s disappearance. Usually they just disappeared into inky silence, without a trace.

Another rumble of thunder, too low to be audible, but strong enough to be felt, passed through the office.

Lately too many of his cases seemed to settle around government contractors. The rush of often poorly overseen privatization of government work, coupled with the spending bonanza of the “global war on terror,” had led to a boom in contractor fraud. For a while, it had gone largely unnoticed and unchecked, but then courageous whistle-blowers had begun to come forward. Sadly, despite the whistle-blower protection laws, he knew that those witnesses would probably find themselves out of work and unemployable in the government-contracting sector.

But those cases were not his passion. They were just his job. As another rumble of thunder passed through the room, he looked at the framed photo on his desk. The girl who looked back at him from a face framed by blond curls appeared to be just on the cusp of womanhood, entering the awkward stage of life where her smile was the impish one of childhood mixed with the almost-sensed mysteries of adulthood. Elena. Resident forever in his heart, an ache that would never end.

He’d known he wanted to be a cop from the time Elena had disappeared. He’d been sixteen then, six years older than she was. Family tragedies hit in a lot of ways. His sister’s abduction had sent his mom into an alcoholic spiral and his dad into a withdrawal from which he’d never fully emerged.

After Elena disappeared, all that remained was the silence.

It was his father’s sudden, overwhelming sense of powerlessness that had energized Jerrod. He decided he would become a cop. He would step in for fathers whose invulnerability had been irretrievably shattered. He would rescue his father, even if he never found Elena.

That had led him into the army’s military police program, the fastest way to get into uniform and on the job, and a way to pay for the college education he would need in order to work for the FBI. His rugged athleticism and quick, keen mind had attracted the attention of recruiters in the special-ops community, shadowy heroic figures who’d told him he was destined for better things than waving cars through the front gate.

Six years later, he’d passed through the revolving door that led from special operations into private military contracting, where the pay was better and the missions even farther from public awareness. The company he’d worked for had specialized in overseas personal security, protecting U.S. businessmen and key employees in parts of the world where a U.S. passport was all too often irresistible bait for rebels who financed their operations with ransom money.

It was there, in that dark, shadowy world, that he’d learned what happened sometimes to those little girls and boys who disappeared. It was the first time he’d learned that there really was a white slave trade.

He’d become an expert in finding the missing, sniffing out clues that others might miss, able to project complex networks of informants, sources and dark alliances onto a screen in his mind. He followed links that seemed obvious only in retrospect, guided by intuition, supported by a twenty-hour-a-day work schedule when he was on a case.

And then he’d blown the whistle himself.

Ultimately, the case had gone nowhere. He knew what he knew, but too much of what he knew lay in inferences he had drawn from that screen in his mind. The investigator who had worked the case couldn’t verify any of Jerrod’s claims, at least not enough for prosecution.

But it had pushed him out of the private sector and into the job he’d always wanted. He’d joined the FBI. And he’d joined with a résumé and a passion that had quickly turned into a specialty.