Kane (BBW Billionaire Romance) (10 page)

S
itting
at a work station in the operations room on the executive floor, Reed Henley reached into his pocket as his cell phone vibrated with an incoming text.

Julie Thrall, Children’s Services, 220 Mill Hollow Road, Shotwell.
HELP!!!

The text was from the clone he’d given Daniella Marquardt. For a few seconds, he quirked a confused brow at the message. He had told her that he would have Gallant’s department deal with the kiddie cops and they had. The caseworker’s name was Corbin, not Thrall.

Thrall…

A fresh wrinkle marred his forehead, the name and the location scraping at the back of his skull.

“Fuck!”

A dozen heads swiveled in his direction.

“Get Kane in here,” he barked as he brought up an application that would take control of Dani’s phone. “Tell him it’s Marquardt.”

Reed silenced Dani’s ringer and turned on the speaker, the cloned version of her device equipped with an enhanced microphone and GPS unit, with everything, including the camera, capable of being controlled remotely.

He heard a rumble of motorcycles and a male’s voice.

Just a fare guys…lady’s business aint none of mine.

“Recovery unit, this address,” he barked, tearing off a sheet of paper with the Shotwell location and handing it to one of the men standing by for just such an order.

They want the baby!

Hearing Daniella’s voice eased his tension a fraction, but no more than that. If she was lucky, they wanted her and the baby. Otherwise, he didn’t expect that Daniella would live much longer with everything he had learned about the motorcycle club and their foreign connections.

Kane busted through the door and tossed the man at the workstation next to Reed out of his chair.

Reed typed furiously at his keyboard. His feet danced around, too, hitting pedals under the desk that let him navigate some of the apps on Dani’s phone. He pulled up the camera and saw nothing but black.

The microphone app fed into the computer, converting the words to text. Reed tagged the actors—Daniella, Christine, the unnamed driver, a woman who identified herself as Julie, and a male named Donnie who seemed to be in charge as he ordered some of the other bikers to drag the driver out of the car and put him in a cage.

A picture popped up on screen of a middle aged male with shoulder length brown hair, the source not Daniella’s phone but the database piecing together both Donnie’s voice pattern and his first name. Reed scanned the accompanying text.

Donald Wells, age 32, last release date January 9, 2016, from Albemarle Correctional Institution, New London, NC, after serving six years for first degree kidnapping.

Working the keyboard at the next station, Kane opened up the link on Wells’ name for known associates.

Half a dozen listings for Mills Hollow Road popped up, along with the name and number for the men’s probation officers.

Someone tried to call into Daniella’s phone.

“Don’t lose that number,” Kane bellowed at the communications expert. “I will fucking gut you if you do.”

“Guess you were telling the truth,” they heard Wells say a few seconds later as the incoming call was terminated.

Desperate grunts followed, the sound of a subdued struggle recognizable to every man in the room.

Still tapping away at his keyboard, Reed glanced at his boss. He’d never seen Kane so pale, but that didn’t stop the man from working. He had a picture up of a woman, very early twenties, pretty with blond hair but already showing signs of drug abuse.

Julie Isabelle Brown, prostitution, drug possession, distribution, active warrant out for her arrest…

Kane punched in the cell number listed on Julie’s bond record into the tracking software as the struggle on the other end of Dani’s phone concluded with Wells crowing in victory.

“Hope you don’t mind dry swallowing, bitch.”

* * *

“
Y
ou have Ops Control
,” Kane said, jumping up from the workstation and stripping off his tailored jacket.

“The hell I do,” Reed shot back. “Marcus, get your ass over here.”

Kane rounded on Reed, murder dancing in his gaze. “Marcus doesn’t have your level of OC experience, now stop wasting my fucking time.”

“And I don’t have yours, so maybe you should sit your ass down,” Reed countered. “Plus, you’re obviously going tactical on this and—”

Wrapping his hand around the collar of Reed’s shirt, Kane jerked him close. “Don’t explain company protocol to me.”

Reed smirked and the urge to punch his smug face bordered on uncontrollable. Kane forced his fingers to unclench, his hands dropping to his sides.

“Unless you want to roll out there as a civilian, with just your personal weapons and vehicle and no updates from this room…”

Reed let the unfinished threat hang in the air. Seeing no change in Kane’s expression, he changed tactics.

“Marcus, get Stark on the line.”

“Don’t move, Marcus,” Kane growled.

The young man at the command console froze except for the darting of his eyes between the two most senior men in the building at that moment. The only one who could veto either of them was the man he’d just been ordered to call.

Kane finally released the breath of air he’d been holding in, his gaze flicking to the big clock in the operations room. “Marcus, if you screw up—”

“I know, you’ll gut me.”

Kane acknowledge the threat with a wolfish smile then sprinted from the room. Reed chased after him, reaching the tactical garage thirty seconds after Kane.

“There’s a reason you don’t do tactical anymore,” Kane glared as Reed shrugged into a bulletproof vest.

“Yeah, yeah,” he groused. “I’m an old man with three fused vertebrae. I can still outshoot your stubborn ass.”

“With a scope at five hundred yards,” Kane answered drolly, holstering a second sidearm. Next he shoved a comm link in his ear. “Marcus, tell me you have something.”

“Still pinging Miss Marquardts’ phone but we need another cell tower for direction of travel,” Marcus answered, his reply earning a deep scowl he couldn’t see. “The car service was a Tap&Ride—”

“We’ve got a backdoor into their database,” Kane interrupted.

Stark International had put in an at-cost bid on all the major car service applications, convincing the companies that ran them that their liability risks were too high without driver accountability via GPS tracking. The fine print on the contracts they had won referenced routine system checks. The scope of those checks meant they could engage in 24/7 tracking of over a quarter million drivers in the U.S. and Europe.

“Already working on that, sir. We’re trying to establish a connection with the driver’s GPS.”

“Feed any coordinates into Tac 6,” Reed ordered, grabbing the keys to the tactical van off the hook before Kane could snatch them up. Muffling his comm link, he looked at his boss and friend. “Dani wants you there in one piece.”

Kane snorted, a million shadows multiplying in his already black gaze.

“Dani doesn’t want me there at all.”

T
he recovery unit
will be here in five,” Reed cautioned as Kane exited the van twenty minutes after leaving Stark International.

Reed had the vehicle parked behind a burned out barn. Twenty yards of fallow field separated the barn from a line of trees. Another eighty yards on was the beginning of a dirt drive with a rusting barbed wire gate. Images Marcus had pulled from Google Maps while they waited for satellite coverage showed that the dusty road extended a quarter mile past the turn-off. At the back end of the property, shielded by more densely packed trees, was a one-story ranch style home.

Kane lifted an uncompromising brow. “That’s five minutes in the hands of a Level 22 psychopath.”

Reed’s face went red. They were no longer worried about Donnie Wells. With Marcus checking all cell tower hits for the area and cross referencing the numbers with Wells’ known associates, they strongly suspected that Abraham “Stoker” Turner was in the club’s stash house.

Deemed too crazy even among the bikers, Turner mostly operated separate from the club as its liaison with the East European syndicates, supplying the foreigners with a steady flow of meth and human flesh.

He had earned his club nickname for the things he liked to do to the women when they were no longer attractive or cooperative enough to earn the club money. Calling him a sexual sadist would have been a mild rebuke or, to Stoker’s way of thinking, faint praise.

“Right,” Reed relented and grabbed the shotgun from the weapons rack inside the van. “Let’s just hope no one spots the van or us before recovery gets here.”

They ran the twenty yards to the trees, their black tactical dress visible to anyone passing on the road. They were going in blind, no idea how many vehicles or bodies were at the house. Caution would dictate that they set up a perimeter and perform surveillance for the recovery team.

But the feed from Daniella’s phone inside the house meant there was no room for caution—not for Kane.

You think anyone wants to buy a blind baby?

Kane had one pistol out of its holster, a silencer threaded at its end. Reed recognized the frosty look on his boss’s face.

“So that’s how we’re going to do it?” he asked.

“If necessary,” Kane answered as they came up on the clearing around the house.

At the back of the building, there was a distance of maybe four feet from leaving the trees to being at the rear door. The sides and front had more open space. There were three motorcycles and the Tap&Ride car littering the drive.

Seeing the sedan, Kane’s expression darkened.

The damn coward would be lucky if anyone went looking for him once Daniella and the baby were rescued.

With a hand gesture, he directed Reed toward the front of the building, ordering him to stay within the cover of the trees until called forth. Reed glared in reply, but didn’t argue.

“Four targets minimum,” Marcus advised over the comm link. “One female, Julie Brown. Three males, Abraham Turner, Donald Wells and a third identified only as Paulie. Sounds like he’s their cook.”

“Stop talking” Kane growled. “Unless you’ve got something I don’t already know.”

“Recovery arrival in three-point-five,” Marcus said and then the comm link went silent.

Kane snuck up on the back side of the house. There were two windows—one on the rear door that was covered with grime and the second at the far end that was boarded over. He approached the door at an angle as Stoker took a call.

“Trace?” he queried over the comm link.

“Ilia Grekov,” Marcus answered after a few seconds, his voice turning queasy.

Fuck! Kane cursed silently. If Stoker had a direct line to the Russian Butcher, the club was more connected than they had realized.

Dani and Christine might never be safe.

Kane inhaled then slowly released a deep breath as he tested the door handle.

He knew what he had to do—leave no one alive who could give the Grekovs the name of the missing woman and baby.

Finding the back door unlocked, a calm settled over him. He slipped inside to find a wiry male standing in front of a stove, spacing out over empty pans. Next to him, unmixed and capped, were chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine.

Kane stepped behind him, brought his gun hand up, his forearm flat against the man’s opposite cheek. His other hand snaked behind the target’s head then around his chin.

There was less than half a second of the target realizing he was not alone in the room. He dropped the lid he was holding and then Kane jerked his right arm back to his right side, mirroring the technique with his left arm and snapping the man’s neck.

Something touched against the back of Kane’s knee. Dropping the target, he spun, gun pointed and ready to fire.

Yellow-green eyes stared up at him.

The cat tapped Kane’s leg a second time as Stoker began yelling in the next room.

“Drag Paulie’s fucking ass in here so I can kick it!”

Cue target number two, Kane thought, lifting the pistol and stepping over the corpse as Wells walked into view.

“What the—”

Kane pulled the trigger and down the man went.

“Fuck! Fuck!” Stoker shouted followed by a two-octave jump in the man’s voice before he screamed a threat that stopped Kane’s heart.

“Bitch, I’ll kill you for that.”

Kane burst into the room, gun up, gaze trained on the far side of the living room where Stoker had one hand covering his eye. The other hand held a Smith & Wesson M&P45. Daniella was on the floor, throwing herself in front of Christine’s car seat. She had something in her outstretched hand.

A red dot bounced against Stoker’s cheek.

Seeing Kane, Stoker jerked his gun arm up, both men firing at the same time.

Stoker’s cheek exploded. Kane spun, a grunt leaving him, his body hitting the ground as Reed kicked in the front door.

Over the comm link, Marcus offered an update.

“Recovery in one-point-two-five.”