Chapter Thirty-Four

A ngela should have known better than to stick a gun in Olivia’s face. Olivia’s survival instinct kicked in. She clapped a hand on Angela’s wrist, ducking her head to the side and wrenching her wrist to the side in what was intended to be an uncomfortable position.

Angela gave a growl of frustration and pain as the gun went skittering to the ground. “Why, you…” She tried to yank her wrist out of Olivia’s grasp. Olivia went in for a sucker punch to the jaw as Brock lunged for the gun. Angela caught sight of him and ducked out of the way of Olivia’s flying wrist, barely scraping it past her ear. She covered the gun with her foot and horse-kicked it backwards, out of Brock’s grasp. Brock cursed ag ain and lunged to help Olivia out with Angela, who was turning out to be quite the fighter, too.

With her free hand, she reached to pull Olivia closer to her. Olivia lost her balance as she careened forward toward the woman, her face meeting Angela’s upturned knee. Pain splintered through her nose and the side of her cheekbone as she released Angela’s wrist and fell to the side. She wasn’t sure if she was bleeding or if her nose was just running, but she didn’t have time to stop and find out.

“Olivia! No!” Brock growled, taking Olivia’s place in the combat with Angela. Olivia rolled onto her back and sent a look in Carl’s direction. So. Angela had been with him all along and lured them into this trap, had they? Well, if they were working together, she felt more confident in fighting back with her. She knew Carl wasn’t going to shoot at them when his wife could possibly get caught in the crossfire.

Carl’s eyes narrowed into slits of frustration and he sighed, coming around the side of the totes. Olivia ignored the pain in her face and rolled over to her knees, launching herself to her feet. Now that it was officially two against two, she readied herself to face the bigger man in the equation. Brock grappled with Angela, attempting to subdue her by swinging her hands behind her back, but that wasn’t going over so well with her. She fought back with trained movements that countered Brock’s attempts to subdue her. Her eyes narrowed as she focused on her own opponent. “Stand down, Carl. You both have already lost.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. You see…” He pointed the gun at her feet and squeezed off a round that hurled itself into Olivia’s ears with a pain that lingered. She jumped back, lucky she wasn’t caught in the ricochet that sent the bullet flying somewhere to the left. Brock and Angela both flinched and whirled around to face Carl as he pointed the gun right at Olivia. “You can’t disarm me without Angela shooting your partner. And he can’t disarm her without me shooting you. You both are weaponless, so I’d say you’re at quite the impasse. ”

“You forget that I’ve already disarmed Angela,” Olivia growled.

At which, Angela laughed. “Do you really think it was that simple?” She fumbled with her jacket and produced another gun. “This one, I believe, is yours.”

Olivia threw a look where she and Brock had discarded their guns, only to see they were nowhere to be found. Angela must’ve picked them up while Carl had them occupied with stepping forward a certain amount and dropping the flashlight. It had all seemed rather specific, Olivia thought to herself. She gritted her teeth together, narrowing a glare at Angela.

“Good. Now that we’ve worked that out, are you going to do anything else particularly stupid?” Carl glared at Olivia. “Give up your cell phones, or I go for the leg.” He lowered the handgun to point at Olivia’s leg. “I don’t have to miss. That first one was just a warning shot.”

Angela grinned and also pointed the gun at Brock’s leg. “Remember that anything you two do results in the other getting hurt. And we sure don’t want that to happen on your honeymoon, do we?”

Olivia sighed. She reached into her pocket where her phone was located and strangely felt two there. Her memory came rushing back to her, reminding her that she had Alasdair’s cell phone with her that she’d grabbed in case they needed to contact Angela again. Not that she could hack into it without her computer, but it was worth a shot. She grabbed her own cell phone, bigger than Alasdair’s by a few inches and pulled it out of her pocket, begrudgingly handing it over to Carl.

“Thank you.” He reached with a gloved hand and took it from her. Olivia dared a glance at Brock who unhappily did the same with his phone to Angela, who pocketed it with a smile.

“Now that that’s over, and you believed our little story about the South Carolina State Police being on our side, something tells me you didn’t call for backup. Which is perfect,” Angela gushed.

“It is perfect,” Keeping the gun trained on Olivia, Carl stepped backward toward where he’d been running the show from behind the wall of totes. “Because when your dead bodies are discovered by Sheriff Carter, they’ll be convinced that you returned to the scene of the crime and were engaged in a firefight between a looter, wrong place wrong time. So you’ll never live to tell the story.”

With that, he reached down, grabbing hold of something – or rather someone. With a yank, he pulled the figure of a man to his feet with his hands tied behind him and a black bag over his head. Brock came up beside Olivia and she could feel every muscle in his body running as tense as she felt. Who was this guy, now? So Carl actually did have a hostage the whole time?

Carl ripped the bag from the hostage’s head, revealing a man, probably around his late twenties or early thirties with a gag preventing him from making much noise. His eyes were wide. Carl plucked the gag from his mouth and the man spat out another cloth that his mouth had been closed around. “What do you think you’re doing, man?”

Olivia didn’t recognize the man. She assumed that he was yet another victim of this underground trafficking ring, kidnapped by being in the wrong place. The man looked over at her, wide eyes begging her to do something. “Carl, listen to me.” Her desperation mounted with each second, along with her mentally kicking herself for not bothering to call for backup. She’d had no idea that Angela was going to lure them into a spider web of lies. “He has nothing to do with this. Let him go.”

“See, there you go again.” Carl’s snide remark creased his lips in a sneer. He nodded his head curtly as if annoyed with her. “You think that you can negotiate with me and that I’ll just let a hostage go. It doesn’t work that way, sweetheart.”

His pet name for her grated on her nerves, but she tried again. “Why not? If you let him go—”

“If I let him go, then I give you both the advantage over me. You think that you can take Angela and me down and in doing so, will send us right to prison without a second thought. There’s no way that we would ever go for something like that, and so we have to take you both out.” He gave a fake pout, tilting his head to one side. “Which is really sad. You make such a cute couple.”

“HR.” Angela snorted, infiltrating Olivia and Brock’s personal space as she kept Olivia’s gun trained on the back of both of their necks, switching back and forth between Olivia and Brock as casually as picking fruit at a grocery store. “You really thought we’d buy that, didn’t you?”

Brock glared daggers at her from the side of his eye. “And you thought that the cover of your own happy-couple story would go unnoticed forever?”

“But it did.” Angela shrugged. “Obviously it worked like a spell because both you and Olivia were convinced that Carl got in trouble with his boss and was going to come after me to kill me. Now, because of your fatal oversight, you can die knowing that you locked up the wrong mastermind and that the true mastermind of this whole operation is going to go free and start over again, somewhere else. So you really did nothing but take out one of our meaningless contacts.”

“Wait,” It was Olivia’s turn to glare, first at Angela, then at Carl. “The real mastermind?”

“That’s right.” He proclaimed with pride. “What? Did you really think Alasdair was smart enough to run an entire crime operation? I’m afraid you don’t know him at all.”

Pieces were falling into place that made so much sense. Alasdair was a charmer, who had two girls from completely different circles infatuated with him and head over heels in love with him. Maybe obsessed was more the word in Alana’s case, as she was even willing to go down with him.

Romeo and Juliet indeed.

Alasdair had made it clear that he knew nothing about the goings on at the warehouse and at first, Olivia hardly believed him. But now, his story made sense.

I get the kids, I drop them off and whatever happens to them inside that warehouse, I’m out at that point. I’ve never actually seen anyone get kidnapped. I receive my orders when to pick up shipments and where to deliver them and that’s as far as my knowledge goes.

He didn’t know enough to ever be a witness to the kidnapping—so he said. Yet he knew just enough guilt to indict him while the real mastermind ran the show from the guise of a tourist with his wife. A court would never believe Alasdair’s fanciful tale that he didn’t know what was going on when he was doing all the grunt work. Carl and Angela had set up Alasdair to take the fall should they ever be discovered. So, why not just let him take the fall, now?

“I get it.” She grasped at straws, words her only weapon at this point. “Alasdair was your ‘get out of jail free’ card. Literally. He did all the dirty work, found the teens, brought them to the warehouse and shipped them out, but you were the one to make the actual deal, to turn them into property after he left them in your hands.”

“Pretty much.” Carl nodded. “Congratulations for figuring that out.”

“So why not let Alasdair take the fall for it now?” Olivia chided. “Why did you re-open Pandora’s box after we had already closed it? You could have skipped the country, knowing that Alasdair was going to jail and no one was even remotely close to suspecting you.”

“We didn’t open Pandora’s box.” Angela’s voice chilled her to the bone. “You did. You see, Carl and I did some digging after we met up with you at the hotel. Who honeymoons to Cape Fremont? Couples who do shotgun weddings or elopements and have no money to travel anywhere extravagant. You didn’t give off that vibe, so after we got to know you that night around drinks, we did some digging. Next time you go undercover, you should really change your name. It was easy to uncover a couple named Olivia and Brock, who was all over the news several months ago because of a case involving Adeline Clarke?”

Adeline? Even now after she was dead, she was still causing issues for them! Olivia shot Brock a defeated look out of the corner of her eyes, not missing how disgusted he looked that they had been so careless with something as silly as changing their names. Maybe they weren’t ready to go back in the field after all. They’d made such a mess of this case.

Angela didn’t stop there. “After learning you were some of the best agents in the FBI, Carl made a good point that if Alasdair were ever arrested, you two wouldn’t stop there. You would want to make sure that all of your T’s were crossed and your I’s were dotted before you left town, so you’d investigate everything, thus leading to Alasdair’s phone. We were right, obviously. So we started making moves toward making sure that didn’t happen long before you ever had the chance to doubt yourselves.”

There were still so many things that didn’t make sense. But they didn’t have time to unravel it.

“The unfortunate thing is,” Angela raised the gun. “Your story ended so tragically. Two of the best agents in the FBI only to be killed by returning to the scene of the crime and shot down by a common looter who’d heard that Alasdair’s warehouse was taken down, thus ripe for the picking. At least you were able to get a few shots in to take him down before he shot you both down in cold blood.”

No protest. No chance to bargain one more time for the innocent guy’s life. Just pure, cold, raw evil. Carl released his hostage and stepped to the side. Angela squeezed the trigger of Olivia’s gun. A bullet whizzed by Olivia’s head. The hostage gave a grunt of pain, flying backward to his place behind the tote where his groans of pain ceased.

Angela gave Olivia and Brock a good hard shove that sent them both flying forward, attempting to right themselves. She then dove behind one of the pillars that the boxes formed, stacked floor to ceiling and providing just enough shelter from the shots that rang out from Carl’s gun that deafened Olivia for a moment.