Girl Undercover 12: Showdown Read online

  “Yes, Captain. I’m here. How do you feel?”

  He tried to move and when he couldn’t, his eyes went down to his arms and legs that were strapped to the chair still. He sucked in a breath and his eyes widened with fear.

  “Why am I tied to this chair…?” he asked, his gaze back to mine. Before I could answer, he grimaced and moaned, “Oh, my head…”

  “What’s wrong with your head?” I asked at the same time as I was searching for a sharp knife that I could use to cut off the zip ties. I found one in a drawer below the cabinets.

  “It hurts like… like a motherfucker.”

  I couldn’t help but smile; Brady only cursed when something was really, really bad. He hurting so much must mean something had in fact happened to his brain. He sure looked like he was back to normal. His eyes had changed, having become a lot softer.

  “Well, that must mean it hurts like hell then,” I said, grinning big I was so grateful. “Hopefully we can take care of that as soon as I’ve gotten these off you.”

  Sinking to my knees, I carved at the zip ties to set him free. Within a minute, all the ties were cut.

  As Brady rubbed his temples and kept moaning, I told George to go to my bathroom and check for some headache meds in the medicine cabinet there. I told Donald, who kept looking at Brady curiously, to go get some water for the captain.

  Brady ran his hands down his face and gazed at me, his eyes bleary now.

  “Why am I here and why was I tied up?” he asked.

  “You honestly don’t remember?” I said in response.

  “No. The last thing I remember is lying in my bed at the hospital, all these tubes going between me and beeping machines beside me. And that’s a blurry memory in itself. Blurry like my dreams. I dreamt a lot while at the hospital. Why was I at the hospital?”

  “You had a heart attack. Someone must have drugged you while you were there.”

  Brady furrowed his brows. “Drugged me? Why would anyone want to do that?”

  I inhaled, thinking about the best way to tell Brady about all that had happened. I should probably do it when I could be sure he was fully recuperated; he still looked weak.

  George returned with some Excedrin in that moment. “That’s all I could find.”

  “Good enough,” I said and took it from him.

  “Here’s water,” Donald said, and I realized he was standing right next to me. He looked confused, which probably had something to do with the fact that I had called Brady Captain instead of dad. We’d have to tell him the truth later at some point.

  “Thanks,” I said and motioned for him to give Brady the water. I opened the Excedrin bottle and shook out a couple of pills that I gave Brady. “Not sure if they’ll help, but I don’t think they’ll hurt you, either.”

  After Brady had swallowed them together with some water, I said, “Let’s go visit my friend Dante at the Marina Del Rey Hospital. He should still be there. I’ll tell you everything that’s happened there.”

  Brady frowned again. “Really? Why can’t you just tell me here?”

  I patted his knee and got to my feet. “When you have heard all that I’m about to tell you, I think it would be wise to have doctors near. In case you have another heart attack.”

  Chapter 5

  Captain Brady, George and I were sitting in the Marina Del Rey Hospital cafeteria. We had spent three hours there, and Dante and Jose had been with us for the first of them; then Ricki insisted that Dante come home. Since his presence wasn’t crucial, Jose had driven him to his house.

  Brady’s original headache improved considerably after he’d swallowed the Excedrin; unfortunately, his head hurt for other reasons now. Having found out what we were facing, and how he had been part of making it happen for a short while were two of them.

  He placed an elbow on the table top and cupped his forehead, sighing so heavily his chest heaved. “I still can’t believe Irena is dead. And that I was the one who staged it.”

  I threw a glance over my shoulder to be sure we were still far away from others in the cafeteria—my boss might be struggling to accept having orchestrated Irena’s accident, but there was no point in making the matter worse by him incriminating himself.

  “With all due respect, sir, what’s done is done,” I said in an undertone. “And it wasn’t really you who did it as you know. It was The Adler Group. They just used you as their weapon.”

  I inhaled, fixing both men with my eyes. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m as upset about her death as everyone else. But before we can indulge ourselves mourning her, we need to look at what we can do to stop Stenger and The Adler Group from going through with the coups. If not, there’ll be lots more to mourn.”

  “Right,” Brady said, looking tired. The youthful energy that had accompanied him since the moment I returned from New York was gone. I felt bad for him and George; I had dumped a lot on them, lots more than I had with Dante, who’d had the luxury of absorbing everything over a few weeks. Even so, I needed to stay strong, keep prodding forward. We had to work on solutions. With such a narrow time frame, every minute counted.

  George had been most shocked by my account, not Brady, I soon discovered. On our way over to the hospital, Brady’s memory quickly returned, and I learned that he already was aware of The Adler Group and that they were shady. The two men he’d arrested in regards to Nick’s murder worked for Adler’s L.A. branch as security guards. One of them, a very good-looking, Asian man, had breakfast at a Venice coffee shop that Brady sometimes frequented. The Asian guard had bragged to a much older man about the hit he’d made for the company, doing such a good job taking out some nosy detective that Adler would take care of the Asian and his friend Leroy when the company took over. Take care of their entire families.

  As soon as the men left the coffee shop, Brady snatched the younger one’s paper cup and took it to the division’s lab. The technicians there compared the man’s fingerprints against ones found in Nick and my bedroom, and, miraculously, it was a match. Brady then looked for security guards working in the L.A. area named Leroy and found their fingerprints at the California Bureau of Security & Investigative Services. It didn’t take long until he found another match from the crime scene. Leroy, like the Asian man, worked for The Adler Group as a security guard. Interestingly, it turned out that Leroy, who was black, also was very handsome.

  But before Brady got a chance to interrogate the two men, he had the heart attack. When he returned to work, he found out that Detective Garcia had interrogated the suspects. Unfortunately, Garcia had to cut them loose almost immediately because a clerk from the evidence storage room reported there had been a break-in and the coffee cup with the prints was missing.

  “Maybe Ian and I can get through their security if we work on it together?” George suggested in a thin voice, referring to The Adler Group’s unbreakable security. Unlike Brady, his head was fine, but he was significantly paler; Stenger’s plans clearly terrified him. “Two expert brains are better than one, right?”

  “Maybe,” I said and sipped on my coffee. “I should ask him what he thinks of that idea. Let me call him.”

  I found my disposable in my purse and dialed Ian’s number. The call went to voicemail. Frustrated, I left a message in which I told him that I had managed to cure Brady and that I needed him to call me back ASAP. I wanted to add that I was appalled that he wasn’t hanging by his phone in case I called. He’d better be doing something real important not to be answering. But I thought better of it and kept my mouth shut, disconnecting instead.

  “Hopefully he’ll get back to me soon,” I said, putting down the phone. I looked at Brady. “Please tell me about the dreams you mentioned earlier.”

  Brady’s hand with the water glass froze midair. “What dreams are you talking about?”

  “Back at my place, you said something about having had a lot of dreams while at the hospital. Can you remember some of them?”

  Brady puckered his lips as he contemplated my qu
estion. Then, “Yes, I did dream a lot… Strange dreams.” He gazed beyond my shoulder, into the distance. “They were vivid yet blurry at the same time. Really, now that I think about it, the only thing that stands out is this man who kept saying things. He sounded like a robot.”

  He narrowed his eyes as if searching his mind and slowly rubbed his chin. Suddenly, he nodded and his gaze returned to me, his expression grave. Then he looked away again.

  “What?” I demanded. “What’s on your mind? Please tell me, Captain. After all the horror I just told you, I don’t think there’s anything you could say that would shock me, so please don’t worry about that. Just tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Brady parted his lips and sucked in a large breath, meeting my gaze finally. “As you wish. You asked for it, so here goes: The man in my dreams told me that you would come back and that you were going to kill me and lots of other people. That you had gone crazy. I needed to do whatever I could to stop you.” He licked his chapped lips. “I had that same dream when I was released from the hospital. The man kept saying the same things and I’m afraid I fully believed him. I felt strangely compelled to follow his orders.”

  “Do you remember what the man looked like?” I asked.

  Looking beyond me again, Brady’s eyes narrowed once more as he pondered my question.

  “No,” he said and glanced at me. “It was a very… nondescript face. Caucasian, average-looking, middle-aged man. But I do think it was the same one each time I had the dream. And he always insisted that I needed to destroy you before you could destroy me. At first I resisted, but it didn’t take long until I started to believe it.” His eyes suddenly widened.

  “What?” I gasped, alarmed that he was about to have some kind of an attack.

  “As soon as Lisa told me you’d called the station asking for assistance, the man appeared in my mind and told me I needed to stop you from getting help. And I was not asleep then… I was wide awake.” Brady inhaled deeply. “I was suddenly compelled to shut down all your efforts at getting help out in Malibu. That’s how I knew about the phone call made to 911 from your phone.”

  I frowned at him. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

  “The man in my head told me that you had made a call to 911, telling about a hostage situation going on at Cuerpos out in Malibu.”

  “Really? You didn’t hear the request over a police scanner?”

  “No. The man in my head told me. Same with the autopsy. I learned about you wanting to have an autopsy done on the hybrid that was killed because of the man that all of a sudden popped up in my mind and told me to call Sergeant Jackson. The man wanted me to tell the sergeant that you were going through some difficult times that had made you imagine things that weren’t there. The same man told me I had to destroy Irena, have people run her over. Kill her.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “Christ, just listen to me. I’m sounding like a complete lunatic… a strange man giving me orders in my mind.” He snorted disenchanted and shook his head. “Well, it’s clear that I’m going insane...”

  I leaned closer to him and grabbed his hand. “Captain, again, with all due respect, it’s extremely unlikely that you’re going crazy and just hearing voices in your head. Think about it. If you were, it wouldn’t explain how you knew that I had requested an autopsy for the dead hybrid, correct? Or about the phone call Ricki made to 911 if you didn’t hear it over the scanner. Unless someone told you directly, how could you possibly know about those things? No, it sounds to me like someone was able to send you messages and commandos directly into your brain. Someone being The Adler Group. It’s the only explanation. After they drugged you, they were able to communicate with you somehow. It’s almost like you suddenly developed a sixth sense. A sixth sense with a distinct face and voice.”

  Brady stared at me, appearing freaked out and relieved at the same time. He managed a weak smile. “Yes, I suppose that could be. If anything, your explanation is preferable over me having gone mad and hearing voices, I must admit.”

  “You’ll know I’m right if you never again see or hear this man in your mind,” I said, which made me suddenly remember that Dr. Kelly had mentioned that for the reversal to work completely, Brady needed to get Haldol into his system on a regular basis. I told him this and pulled out the paper bag with the bottle and the syringes that I had put in my purse.

  “According to what that doctor said, you need to inject 30 mg into your body on a regular basis,” I said to Brady. “Unfortunately, I don’t know what he meant by regular basis.”

  “No?” Brady said, looking worried. Then he rolled his eyes and bitterly said, “Well, I suppose I can just use the man appearing in my head again as a gauge.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh a little; the man making another appearance was a good gauge. Of course, as long as it didn’t mean it was already too late then.

  “Do you know how to inject the medication?” I asked him. “It seems it’s important you inject it into a vein and not subcutaneously.”

  “Mary will know how to inject it into a vein,” Brady said.

  Right, Brady’s wife was a nurse. She would definitely know how to inject the Haldol properly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just have her do it then. Though, you might want to do it as soon as you start feeling off, not when the man is already making full-blown appearances in your mind.”

  I checked the time. It was past nine in the evening and we were all tired.

  “Listen,” I said. “It’s been a long day and I think we can all benefit from some rest. Especially you, Captain.” I reached across the table and patted his hands that were folded over the paper bag. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “We’ve all been through a lot. Let’s call it a night and then resume tomorrow. I’ll be up before dawn as usual tomorrow, and then I’ll think of ways we can stop these bastards.” He and George got to their feet.

  “Please text me in the morning so I know that you’re still with me,” I told Brady. “And use this number, not my regular phone.” I gave him my latest burner number.

  Five minutes later, I had said goodbye to the two men and was on my way to my Toyota. It bothered me that Ian had still not returned my call, and it also bothered me that we had no idea if The Adler Group would know that Brady was no longer an untouchable. Would they notice that their messages and commandos were no longer going through? Sadly, there was no way of knowing this. We could only hope they wouldn’t.

  I unlocked the car door and entered the car, then drove to my hotel room at the W, all the while keeping my phone in my lap in case Ian tried to call me.

  By the time I was in the elevator, heading to my room, two entire hours had passed since I had called the Brit and I had yet to hear from him.

  What the hell was going on?

  It was bad enough that he hadn’t picked up when I called the first time, but then not returning my call? What was he thinking? With less than ten days to go—barely nine now—the two of us should be glued to our phones so that we could reach each other in a matter of seconds. I blew out an annoyed breath as I swiped the keycard that opened my door and entered my room.

  Inside it, I threw myself on the big bed and stared up into the ceiling, the phone on my stomach.

  Well, he will call soon, I assured myself. He must have fallen asleep or something.

  But he didn’t, and at some point soon after that I found myself falling asleep.

  I awoke the following morning because the California sun was glaring into my eyes, prying them open. I’d never gotten a chance to close the curtains before the windows.

  Groggily, I opened my eyes and it only took me a few seconds to know where I was and all that was going on. The only thing I didn’t get was how I had managed to fall asleep so easily when so much was at stake. But I had, and there was nothing else to do but to accept that fact, then move on with the day. At least it appeared like it was early.

  Remembering that I
had placed my phone on my stomach, I reached for it. It was no longer there. Fear surged through me at this discovery, but I soon calmed down when I noticed that it was lying on the bed beside me, and that there was still some battery left in it.

  I brought it to my face, hoping to see some missed calls from Ian. To my disappointment, the only missed call displayed on the screen was from Captain Brady. I assumed the voicemail I had was also from him. Just to be sure, I played it.

  It was from Brady, telling me he was still feeling like himself and to call him when I got a chance.

  I sat up in bed, rubbing my eyes. Now I was really getting worried. Why was Ian not calling me? I checked the time. Like I had assumed, it was early, only seven a.m., which meant that it was ten in New York. He’d had ample time to get back to me. So why wasn’t he?

  I tried calling him, but again his voicemail picked up. I left another message—sounding a lot more worried than annoyed this time around—begging him to call me as soon as he heard it.

  As I hung up, my heart was heavy with fear. What if something had happened to Ian? For him not to get back to me was beyond weird, not like him at all, especially now.

  What if he had tried to get his hands on Jonah, but failed and Jonah had killed him? I knew very well what Jonah was capable of, and after him freaking out about someone watching him, this could easily be the case. When he realized someone was in fact watching him, which Ian definitely was, he might have done something drastic, hired bodyguards to be sure he was safe. Maybe the guards had found Ian, brought him to Jonah, who no doubt would have killed him when he saw the person who was stalking him.

  He already hated Ian, so the choice of punishment would be a no-brainer…

  My airways tightened as panic worked its way through me at the thought of Ian being dead, leaving me alone to face Stenger and The Adler Group. My heart galloped against my ribcage. How will I be able to do that on my own? Even though Brady was back, I didn’t think I would be able to do it. What with him being dependent on the Haldol, I felt as though I could lose him to The Adler Group any moment.