Chokepoint, p.1
Chokepoint, page 1
CHOKEPOINT
A US NAVY SPECIAL AGENT MIRA ELLIS THRILLER
DECEPTION POINT
BOOK 4
CANDACE IRVING
PROLOGUE
He should've killed himself when he'd had the chance.
A bullet to the brain, a makeshift noose about his neck—hell, even standing hip-deep in water and smashing his fist into a light socket. Anything would have been preferable to this. Definitely quicker.
His left leg was broken. At least, he was pretty sure. He'd lost count of the number of times that goddamned iron pipe had slammed into his shins, but he was fairly certain he'd felt the bone crack a minute ago.
Or was that an hour?
How long had he been dangling from his wrists inside this sweltering box?
Days? Weeks?
Months?
He no longer knew. All he knew was pain. He welcomed it. It gave him something to concentrate on in place of their incessant questions.
One of the bastards was at his ear again, the man's foul breath spilling over the right side of his face. If only the fucker would whale that pipe into his stomach instead of his kidneys for a change. He just might be able to puke on him. He settled for second best. Gathering the saliva he'd hoarded, he turned his head and spewed it into that yammering mouth.
Too bad his eyes were swollen shut. What he'd give to see the turd's expression.
He felt it instead as another rib went the way of his shin. He inhaled sharply, then wished to heaven he hadn't.
Breathe!
Can't. Goddamn it, he'd lost a lung. No, wait—it was there. Merely collapsed, the air knocked halfway to Mecca.
The haji was in his face again. Taunting. "Save yourself, kafir. No one else will. Surely not Allah."
It was true. He had no illusions. They'd been shattered long before his leg and his ribs. Nor would God—this asshole's or anyone else's—deign to help. When push came to shove, the good Lord couldn't be bothered to save his own son.
No, it was up to him. And her.
Time.
It was all he had left to offer. To her and his country. He'd be damned if he'd held on this long, only to blow it now.
"This is the last time I ask, kafir. Where is she?"
He found another ounce of spit and used it.
A strangled groan ripped free as the pipe crashed into his collar bone. Unlike his lung, this dent wasn't popping back out. He dropped his chin to his chest, sucking in stale air and his own bloody spittle as he fought the plea clawing up his throat.
He was dimly aware of the scrape of metal on metal in the blistering existence that followed.
Perhaps the bastard was right and there was a God, because somehow, he found the strength to open his left eye. Just a crack. The haji on his far left was bending over a heavy-duty, deep-cycle battery, attaching a pair of jumper cables. The ends had been stripped down to bare, taunting wire. The man crammed his meaty fists into rubber gloves, then retrieved the cables and snapped the raw ends together.
Twelve chilling volts sparked and spitted to life. More than enough to stop a human heart. They wouldn't even have to douse him in seawater for max effect.
He was drenched in sweat and blood.
"Last chance, kafir."
"Go to hell."
The wires closed in. A split second later, his entire body convulsed—broken bones and all—as white-hot lightning ripped through his groin. And then his body went slack, twisting in the nonexistent wind…until the wires returned.
Again and again.
Somehow, the secrets he'd locked deep within escaped his splintered brain and invaded his tongue. He was pleading with them now. Shamelessly.
Another jolt, and the truth finally tumbled free.
That's when he knew it was over.
He never saw the haji move, only smelled the blessed absence of that putrid breath beneath the stench of his own burning flesh.
Then he heard the order. "Aqtalhi."
Kill him.
It was done. The most important mission of his life—and he'd failed.
1
Her reprieve came early. Thirty-one hours and eighteen minutes—and not a second too soon.
Air ripped through Mira's lungs as she vaulted down from her aerobic climber to follow the shrill of her phone out of the bedroom of her Washington, DC, sublet. The phone trilled again as she raced past the galley kitchen and into an equally cramped living room. Adrenaline surged, supplanting desperately courted, exercise-induced endorphins as she reached the coffee table and caught sight of her caller ID.
Ramsey. A case.
For a moment, guilt battled with her own desperate, selfish need.
Need won.
Mira dragged in a steadying breath as she grabbed the phone. "Who died?"
"And hello to you, too, Special Agent Ellis. If I'm not mistaken, the clocks have ticked past midnight along the entire Eastern Seaboard. Odd time to work out…especially since you're supposed to be on vacation."
Vacation her ass. Try eight days of mind-numbingly slow, guilt-riddled leave. And the man who'd "suggested" she take it was on the other end of her line.
"Blame the neighbor's cat. He's still spending his nights trying to seduce the stone planter outside my window."
"This the cat that got run over last month?"
Crap.
Silence more pregnant than the five remaining felines infesting the alley filled the line.
"Still having trouble nodding off, eh?"
"Nope."
Nodding off wasn't the issue. It was the inevitable waking up shortly thereafter that had her clinging to the outer edges of sanity—despite the shrink session that this man had also convinced her to attend. Not only had the session not helped, all the lengthy discussion had done was burn into her brain the very image—and guilt—that she'd give just about everything to excise.
Mira stared at the bottle of scotch that'd taken up residence on the coffee table following her return from the shrink's office. At least the glass beside the bottle was empty—and clean.
Now.
"You want to talk about it?"
She flushed, and not because of the offer. It was his tone.
The raw compassion infusing the line didn't belong to William H. Ramsey, Special Agent in Charge of the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service's Washington Field Office. Hell, it hadn't even come from the NCIS agent who'd walked out of a senate committee briefing almost two weeks earlier to beat feet to Creighton Middle School upon learning that she'd discharged her service weapon into a depraved piece of shit bent on concealing his true nature behind a chest full of medals, his sixteen-year career as a Navy corpsman and a twelve-year-old boy.
No, the sympathy still oozing through her phone line had come from Bill, the closest thing to an uncle that she was lucky enough to have.
Somehow, that made it worse.
Mira turned her back on the half-empty bottle of scotch and checked the clock above the fireplace. Ramsey and her instincts were right. It was a quarter past midnight. Worse, though she'd been working out for nearly an hour, she wasn't breathing hard anymore. Amazing what a colossal case of remorse could do for the body.
At least on the outside.
Mira concentrated on the disembodied Arabic accent of a stewardess running through preflight checks as it spilled out of the phone and into her right ear. It beat focusing on those strangely silent, soul-stripping sobs that had been haunting her since she'd taken that shot with her service weapon—along with those huge brown eyes and the utter devastation that had been within.
Devastation that she'd caused.
And when she added on the old acidic shit that had been dug up as a result and publicly sprayed into her face via the local news…
"Hon—"
"You want to tell me why you're calling from a runway halfway around the globe, or am I supposed to guess?"
The silence returned—even with that droning stewardess—and this time it was terse. Uncle Bill had left. Special Agent in Charge William Ramsey had taken his place, and he was not happy that she'd cut him off.
Mira clamped down on her phone, waiting for the reprimand she deserved.
Ramsey sighed instead. "There's been a murder. Commander Theresa Corrigan. She was a Navy JAG. I'm told Corrigan was a recent transfer to the Pentagon, dealt with espionage cases mostly."
Mira sifted through her memory. "Never heard of her."
Not surprising. She snagged a rumpled, but clean hand towel from the laundry basket she'd left beside the couch the night before. She might've been investigating the scourge of the Fleet for six years now, but there were over nine hundred lawyers hard-lined to the Judge Advocate General's office—and not only were those JAG lawyers scattered around the globe, but they also specialized in everything from Military Justice and National Security to Civil Litigation and Maritime Law.
Even during her initial tour with NCIS at the San Diego Field Office, she'd tended to focus on the former, investigating violent crimes almost exclusively. For good reason. She appeared to have a knack for solving them.
Who knew?
Mira mopped the perspiration from her face and hooked the hand towel over her shoulder. "What do we have?"
"Not much. It's not even our case. Yet. The commander's body was found earlier this evening—in her bed. Her townhouse is a couple of blocks northeast of Dupont Circle. As you can imagine, there are…issues."
She'd just bet there were. And every one involved jurisdiction.
Dupont Circle was locate d within spitting distance of the White House and a good three miles from the closest naval facility, the Washington Navy Yard. Not only did jurisdiction for the commander's murder not automatically fall within NCIS' purview, it fell squarely within the DC Metropolitan Police Department's. Nor was MPD's current chief known for passing off cases, especially when the victim was high-profile. A category for which a Navy JAG who worked terror cases definitely qualified.
The disembodied voice of the flight attendant saturated the line once more, asking passengers to turn off their phones. Mira ignored the request along with Ramsey as she headed out of her living room. "We could flash the national security card."
"We may have to. But, so far, we don't have cause. And if MPD finds out we pulled a fast one, it'll piss off their chief in a major way. I'd like to avoid that if possible."
So would she. Cops had long memories.
Mira reached her bedroom and culled one of the suits from her closet. The plane's engines cut in and began to whine as she turned to toss the dark-blue jacket and slacks onto her bed. "Who caught the case?"
"Detective Dahl."
"Jerry Dahl?"
"The one and only."
Mira grinned. She might not know why Jerry had abandoned his plan to join San Diego's finest after he'd retired from NCIS, but she knew exactly why Ramsey had phoned her tonight—despite Ramsey's directive that she ease her way back onto the case roster upon her return to the Field Office come Monday morning.
She and Jerry had history. The kind that made a cop grateful.
Indebted even.
"You still out of town?"
She snagged an ivory blouse from the opposite end of the closet and added it to the growing pile of clothes on the bed. "I never left. The realtor called before I could hit the road. He had a potential buyer who wanted to fly in to see the place. Some captain with orders to teach at the Academy. I decided to stay here."
She'd told herself it was because there might be additional showings.
The real reason lay in those brown eyes and the silent sobs that had been dogging her every moment these past thirteen days—sleeping and waking. Imagine how much more gut-wrenching they'd have been if she'd spent the past seven incarcerated in the family mausoleum in Annapolis as planned, sifting through what was left of her and her brother's childhood memories stored up in the attic so they could finally unload the place?
"Did you get an offer on the house?"
"No. The guy changed his mind during the showing and asked to rent." And this time around, she was determined to sell. Even if she could reach her brother to discuss it, she knew Nate would agree. That said, the abode she was most interested in at the moment did not come with a prized sailboat slip within view of the US Naval Academy. "You got an address for the murdered JAG?"
"Yeah. I just texted it." The whine of the plane's engines increased in pitch as her boss' phone pinged. "Damn. I gotta go. Keep me posted."
"Will do."
Mira hung up, already forming her coming strategy as she tossed her phone onto the bed before heading for the bathroom to turn on the shower.
By the time Ramsey's plane touched down in DC, she would be working the Corrigan investigation. If she had to abuse her past with Jerry Dahl to get herself waved through the door, so be it. She simply could not take another night, let alone another week with nothing but Caleb McCabe's dark, devastated eyes filling her head.
Not if she wanted to stay sane.
The blue and red, strobe-lit circus was in full swing when she arrived.
Mira eased her black Chevy Blazer in behind the dozen-odd MPD cop cars, crime scene vans and unmarked SUVs clogging the townhouse-lined street. She was willing to bet her own federal credentials that at least one of those Explorers was registered to a colleague from the J. Edgar Hoover building across town. Confirmation came in the approaching clean-shaven, twenty-something Boy Scout sporting a red pinstriped tie and higher-end version of her JC Penney's navy-blue special.
Definitely FBI.
Judging from the no joy stamped along the Feebee's jaw as he tossed his shiny, stainless-steel crime scene kit onto the rear seat of the nearest Explorer before climbing into the front to fire it up, Jerry had already won at least one pissing contest tonight. Fortunately, she'd long since discovered that the Scouts were only partially right. Sometimes it was prudent to come prepared…and sometimes not.
Or at least, to not look like it.
Mira retrieved the bare necessities from her own battered crime kit, secreting the protective booties, latex gloves and a few other crucial items she unearthed within her trouser pockets as she bailed out of the Blazer and into the unusually chilly late March night.
Suppressing a shiver, she headed for the blood-red brick facade of the JAG's Victorian townhouse, making it to the crime scene tape before an MPD uniformed patrol stopped her.
"Excuse me, ma'am. I—"
She flashed her credentials. "Special Agent Mira Ellis, NCIS. I'm here to see Detective—"
"Mir!"
Jerry's stocky, rough-and-ready Irish form bounded through the townhouse's gaping door and down its trio of stone steps. Mira was still tucking her credentials home as Jerry elbowed the uniform aside so he could reach over the wrought-iron gate to haul her into his generous warmth for a soul-balming hug.
"Damned good to see you. Though, given the customer upstairs, I can't say I'm surprised." Jerry eased back, patting the side of her face as if he had forty years on her instead of twenty—and she let him. "You look great, Mir."
She laughed. "You look gray."
His grin deepened, splitting into the lines bracketing his lips. The same lines that stress had begun to carve in during the fiasco that had heralded the twilight of Jerry's own career with NCIS. "I see those manners and that mouth haven't improved."
"Not a chance."
The uniform cleared his throat.
Jerry spared the kid a glance as he swung the gate wide and waved her in. "She's with me, Mandello." Jerry hooked his beefy right arm about her shoulders and gave her another squeeze as they headed up the stone steps. "I'd heard you'd made it back to town. Meant to holler sooner, but MPD put me on the homicide roster the same day I swore in, and it's been a nonstop shitstorm since. Then the news broke about that goddamned pedo chief—along with the garbage his widow's been spewing into the ear of every reporter in town this past week." Jerry shifted his callused palm to the back of her neck and gently nudged her into the townhouse's narrow, empty foyer, his voice dropping low as they came to a halt midway in. "I left a message for you at the Field Office."
Mira focused on the closed door of the ground-floor condo, unable to deal with that all-too-seductive compassion face to face and from this man any more than she had over the phone with Ramsey. "I took some time off."
Not that it had helped.
"That's what Aisley told me. Figured I'd wait 'til you got back in the saddle before I reached out again." He gave Mira's arm a final squeeze, then dropped his hand. "How you holding up?"
"You know me."
His clipped nod was tempered by nearly three years of working together across abutted desks on the opposite side of the country…and a few stark confessions on both their parts as Jerry's mentorship had drawn to a close. "They suggest you see someone?"
"Yup."
"Go. It helped me."
She blinked.
"Yeah, I know. Back then, I'd have sworn that the only way you'd get me on a shrink's couch was if you marched me into the room at gunpoint and cuffed me to it. But things change. I changed. Blame it on Shelli. I never told you, but things weren't all that great between us before that Kelter witch accused me of blackmailing her for sex while her husband was on duty. And when it got out that Shelli and I had started dating before the ink was dry on the divorce papers with her asshole of a sailor? Let's just say it got a lot worse before it got better."
That surprised and infuriated her. "I could've sworn Shelli believed you."
"She did. It was everyone else who didn't—except you. Shell and I had other issues, ones there weren't easy solutions to. That witch's lies just made it all worse. And I don't have to tell you that exoneration counts for piss in this profession. Suspicion lingers—even after your electronic sleuthing blew the Internal Affairs investigation out of the water. Hell, it got so bad that I seriously considered bailing on eighteen years and a pending pension and heading off to parts unknown."
