Hot Zone (Elite Force #2)(25)
Author: Catherine Mann

The van hit a pothole, jostling his shoulders against the metal side. Crates bounced and settled. If one of those fell from the top, it could do serious damage. He inched along the floor, doing his best to place his body between Amelia and any threat, but shit, everywhere he looked red flags blared. A knife. A gun. Fifty-pound crates tottering in too-high stacks.

And kidnappers with God only knew what agenda.

“How are you here?” Amelia whispered urgently. “I don’t understand how you found us.”

Part of planning an escape hinged on keeping Amelia calm, so he figured it was worth the risk to talk. “I heard you scream as I was leaving.” He pushed back the hellish memory of the moment he’d realized that cry of panic had come from Amelia. “There wasn’t much time to catch you. I was trying to pull a James Bond with my entrance, but that whole hanging-onto-a-moving-vehicle-and-punching-out-the-driver thing doesn’t work quite the same way in real life.”

Tucking the restless toddler closer to her, she managed a wobbly smile. “Looked like you accomplished more than anyone else could, outside the movie world.” She leaned closer to him. “They call each other Oliver and Tandi. They wanted to kidnap Joshua. I caught them trying to take him from the hospital.”

“Okay, that explains a lot. You’re doing good, Amelia. You’re doing good.”

He glanced at their captors up front, and while the woman kept her gun trained on them, she hadn’t tried to tie them up and she hadn’t squeezed off any more wild shots. They seemed more concerned on putting distance between them and the school. Actually the smarter plan, because if they’d stopped to tie him up, he could have disabled that person and gotten the weapon before the other could blink.

Meanwhile, he’d been taking note of the landscape as best he could out the front windshield to guess their location. Not much to go on, though. Just a sense that they were driving east, deeper into the jungle. The van wove off the road as Oliver steered around another fallen tree.

Pulling in his focus, drawing on training, Hugh stared around the crowded van at the supplies—water and juice. Took in Oliver’s uniform. He had some sort of paramilitary look to him, the patches in an indecipherable language. Eastern European, perhaps? Except he didn’t have an accent. From the look of the back of the van, it seemed they’d been able to enter the epicenter of the earthquake site by appearing to deliver supplies. The uniform had most likely been stolen.

Hugh inched closer to her, keeping his voice low. “Fill me in on the rest. Think in terms of details. Anything could be helpful.”

She jostled Joshua until the baby started to settle, his eyelids growing heavier, thank God. “After we uh… well, as I was walking back to Joshua, I saw a woman trying to sneak him out of the hospital. She claimed to be his biological mother.”

His eyes shot to the front of the van, assessing the woman with different eyes. “He was taken from his parents and put up for adoption?”

“That’s what I thought at first,” she said softly, quickly. “Then she said she’d lost him during the earthquake, which of course isn’t possible, since he’d already been adopted by Aiden and Lisabeth by then.”

A chilly certainty jelled in his gut. “She was lying.”

“I even wondered if she might be a grief-stricken mother mistaking Joshua for her real child, but then Oliver stepped out with the knife. I realized they were kidnapping Joshua.” She shuddered. “They made me come along—not that I would have left him.”

The pieces all came together and the final picture couldn’t be any worse. “You have to understand what they must want with him.”

She nodded tightly. “They said they have customers for both of us. We have to get away before this van reaches its destination. Tell me what to do.”

Yeah, he agreed, and he would do his damnedest to make it happen. Although even for a guy who was willing to go all the way to the edge, options seemed slim to none.

And the unwavering confidence in her eyes stabbed him clean through. “You do realize I’m not actually Superman, right?”

He knew his own fallibility too well, felt it all the stronger at times like this, when the stakes were so intensely personal.

Amelia cupped the back of Joshua’s head and stared straight at Hugh, her jaw set stubbornly. “I also know you don’t quit. So stop worrying about not getting my hopes up and let’s start planning.”

***

From the back of the van, Amelia watched her kidnappers, determining what little she could from the green glow of the dashboard lights. She made her living off noting the tiniest details and gauging expressions from witnesses. But it had never been more important than now to get things right. She kissed the top of Joshua’s head as he slept in her arms, his gentle baby snores so sweet, her heart squeezed.

Eyes front, she reminded herself.

Oliver’s rough handling of the van, his sharp stops and starts, and a dark hint in his voice left her certain he was the kind of remorseless criminal out for profit. She’d seen dozens of henchmen just like him cycle through the justice system. The worst were those who took advantage of children. She pushed back distracting memories of the first time she’d seen that evil in her own father’s eyes. Memories of his arrest. Of his suicide.

Grappling for focus, she shifted her attention to Tandi—currently talking on a two-way radio with someone she called the “Guardian.” Tandi appeared to have more layers to her motivations than Oliver. The voice on the other end was muffled, either a deep woman’s voice or higher-pitched man’s voice. Tandi’s hands drifted with a butterfly gentleness as she juggled some kind of walkie-talkie with an earbud.

The woman had winced when Amelia couldn’t bite back a cry of pain when Oliver’s driving slammed her against a crate. And when she’d fired the gun into the back, the shot had been so wide that Amelia suspected it had been a scare tactic.

Could Tandi be the weak link? Persuadable? Because without question, they couldn’t wait for the van to arrive at its destination to make a move.

The fact that they could communicate and drive about so freely in this time of limited resources and access sent a fresh bolt of fear even deeper inside her. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment, low-level operation. These two had serious, deep-rooted connections.

Pressing an earbud more firmly in place with one hand, Tandi grabbed the dash as the van bucked and shimmied along the narrow road winding through a thick forest lit only by the twin band of headlights. “We have the cargo as promised, plus a bonus soul. A woman. We may have been mistaken in thinking the boy had no family. The woman claims he’s with her, that her family adopted him. There’s also a possibility the hospital mixed up records in all the confusion, sending us the wrong information.”