In Hot Pursuit Read online

  In

  Hot Pursuit

  Patrick Doyle

  Prologue

  Eleven Months Earlier, Queens, New York

  The deep groans were short, torturous, and barely audible, but they were loud enough to get their attention across the room. The sounds reminded them of a trapped, wounded animal waiting to be put out of its misery, and they would have been more than happy to do just that—their job was to shoot and kill anyone who they suspected pose an immediate danger to them, but this mission was different. It was a search and recovery one—and they had thought that there were no survivors when they entered the house.

  The five men were dead, and from the look of it, had probably been for the last five or ten minutes. They were slumped over in a heap against the wall next to each other. It appeared they had crawled there to die, just before their hearts had given out. It was somewhat admirable that they had taken their last breath huddled together in, a birds of a feather, sort of way.

  They stood over the men and gazed down at their stiff, lifeless bodies, trying to come up with answers, and there was only one they could think of—a suicide pact. It didn’t appear that any of them had been murdered. They had chosen to end their own lives in a last bid attempt to save themselves from being captured. Their glazed over eyes were frozen in time, and the white froth at their gaping mouths was still fresh, indicating that they hadn’t been dead for long. They might as well be dead—they had just avoided the inevitable—spending the rest of their pathetic lives isolated in a prison cell in a remote part of the country, never to see the light of day again, with only a number on their prison cells to tell who they were and what they had done.

  The system was set up in such a complex way that only members of the team and a handful of high ranking government officials had knowledge of it. Everything was numbered and color coded in two specific colors—red for terror related suspects, and blue for their accomplices. They wouldn’t wish that sort of punishment on anyone, including their enemies. That sort of anonymity was a death sentence by itself. But it was needed to keep the nature of their work a secret. The anonymity had given them the power to foil hundreds of terror plots and bring dozens of dangerous terrorists to justice over the last three years the team had been in operation.

  “Over here! This one is alive! He’s barely breathing, but he’s alive! We may be able to save him. He doesn’t appear to have the deadly symptoms as the others.”

  The excitement in Dr. Bailey’s voice was palpable. They were hoping to find someone alive. He hurried over to the man’s side just as he slipped back into unconsciousness. He leaned over his unresponsive body and began the arduous task of trying to revive him.

  He had never been this desperate to save anyone, especially a suspect in a criminal investigation, than he did with this man. They wanted him alive. He inserted one gloved finger into the man’s mouth, and did a quick, but thorough sweep of his mouth and passage way, checking to see if there were any of the deadly capsules embedded there. He could have had one hidden under his tongue, waiting for the right moment to bite down on it, and finish the job, just like the others.

  “There’s nothing in his mouth. His air way is clear.” Dr. Bailey reported back to the others who were hovering close by waiting for the final verdict.

  He turned his full attention back to the man and began to do CPR, hoping he wasn’t too late to save him. There was still no sound or movement from the unconscious man, not even a whimper. Dr. Bailey leaned in and pressed his head against his chest.

  “His heartbeat is getting stronger. He will eventually come out of it.” He cut into the worn polyester sweater and used his stethoscope to listen to the man’s heart. “He’s breathing independently. That’s a good sign. He won’t need an oxygen mask

  after all.” He removed the oxygen mask he had been holding over the man’s face.

  He stood back and watched the steady rise and fall of the man’s hairless, brown

  chest. He was unusually gaunt, and his face and body were covered with deep,

  festering scars. He had been tortured, if not whipped, and burned into submission.

  “I hope he makes it. We need him to tell us what happened here. And as now, he’s

  our only suspect.” Thomas Earnes, one of the five elite ICE Agents on the mission, drew closer and peered down into the man’s sweaty face. His eyes were almost swollen shut from a recent beating, and he was sweating profusely. He obviously

  had something in his system.

  “He will recover,” Dr. Bailey reassured him. “It may take a day or two, but he will be fine, well, at least physically. We will have to wait and see how he copes with what had been done to him. And I could assume, by looking at him, that it was something terrible.” He reached for the man’s hand to check his pulse. “He’s weak, as expected, but he will eventually come out of it. He’s certainly not at death’s door, which is more than I can say for the wretched lot over there.” He pointed to the line of dead men.

  “He’s all we’ve got,” Agent Gabriella Bowles, one of the senior elite agents, told him. “We need him. We can’t afford to lose him. He has to tell us what went on here with those guys, because those ones certainly can’t!” She gestured to the five bodies on the floor.

  “He’s weak, but he’s going to be fine.” Dr. Bailey reiterated. He pried the man’s

  eyes opened and shone his ophthalmoscope into them. “He doesn’t appear to have any head or neurological damage. He’s just in a comatose state because of what he

  ingested. I can do a more thorough examination when I get him back to the lab.”

  The man’s eye sockets were sunken. His cheek bones had been shattered, and he appeared to be in a tremendous amount of pain. His face was completely disfigured. He had probably been held captive. Dr. Bailey shook his head and stood. He stepped away from the man, turned to Earnes and Bowles, and spoke,

  “He needs another couple hours to sleep it off, then he will be good to go.

  Hopefully, he will be coherent and alert enough to answer your questions.”

  “Do you think he took cyanide like the others?” Agent Bowles gave him a doubtful look.

  “He definitely swallowed something, but it may be less fatal than the others. It’s my guess that he had a desperate last minute change of heart. For one reason or the other, he wanted to live. Those ones chose the cowardly way out. ” Dr. Bailey glanced at five dead men that were lined up against the wall, waiting to be transported back to the morgue. “I suspect he led the others to believe that he was going to do the same thing as them. They would have probably taken him out first if they had the slightest suspicion that he was going to do the opposite. We will know more about what he took when we get him back to the lab and run some

  tests.”

  Agent Bowles looked down at the unconscious man. He was of Middle Eastern

  descent, battered and emaciated, unlike like the other five, who all appeared fit and

  in good health, well except for the fact that they were all deceased. They were all

  South Asian and Middle Eastern nationals.

  “This one might have been their look out man—the bottom of the totem pole,”

  she concluded. She bent and took one of the man’s long, twisted fingers and inserted it into the digital machine to check his finger prints. “At least he still has his prints intact. The others are all gone.” She glanced over at the corpses. “They took the time to burn them off. They probably did it in the last couple of days too. The wounds are still fresh. They haven’t had time to heal.”

  She had been completely repulsed by the sight and stench of the pus on their festering fingers. Maybe Marcy would be able to get a print or a DNA sample from them. She was more than
happy to leave that part of the job to forensics.

  “Nonetheless—they didn’t want us to identify them,” Dr. Bailey added. “We may be able to get a sense of who they are from face recognition. This chap here may not have carried the same amount of weight as them. He was badly beaten. It appeared he had been tortured as well. A couple of his toes are missing, as are parts of his ears and his teeth. They probably pulled those with pliers. There are cigarette burns on his tongue as well. I’m surprised they didn’t cut it off to prevent him from talking. He has been through sheer hell! It reminds me of the torture political prisoners receive in countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq.”

  Dr. Bailey removed the man’s shirt to revealed burn marks and scars all over

  his thin body. “Cigarette burns and electric cables, by my guess. The marks and scars are consistent with it.”

  “Some of the wounds are new.” Agent Bowles leaned over to have a closer look

  of the deep red marks on the man’s chest, back and arms. “They probably used it to keep him in line, and to get him to do what they want.”

  “He probably had a changed of heart and wanted out. They wouldn’t let him,” Dr

  Bailey added.

  “It’s possible he knew too much,” Earnes agreed.

  “He’s a student.” Bowles read the information that had popped up on the

  screen. “He’s a thirty-two year old Pakistani national. At least that’s what it says here in his passport. The passport hasn’t been flagged, so it could be legit. It’s also new. It appears he has never left his country, except for this trip.” A disconcerting frown appeared on Bowles’ face. “Somehow, I find that very hard to believe.” She glanced at the information again.

  Earnes agreed. “He probably didn’t want us to know about the countries he has been to recently. It’s an evasive tactic ISIS followers are using now. That way we wouldn’t flag them as potential terror suspects, and put them on our watch list.

  Bowles strolled down to see what else was there.

  “He arrived in the country last year on a student’s visa. He is registered at MIT as a full time engineering student. And from what I can see here, he still is. He has been attending classes regularly, until four months ago.”

  “Probably around the time he arrived in New York to join those guys.” Earnes

  peered over her shoulder to have a look at the screen.

  “It’s becoming the new norm for suspected terrorists,” Agent Bowles told him. “A student visa is an easy way for them to enter the country. It’s more accessible than a tourist visa. No one is going to suspect them that easily. They attend a few courses to appear normal, then they disappeared and joined a sleeper cell or got recruited by Islamic extremists. It’s a troubling pattern, and one that’s becoming

  extremely hard for us to recognize and fix.”

  “Do you think he’s has ties to ISIS or Al Qaeda?”

  “It’s hard to tell,” Bowles gave him a troubling look. “We will know more when

  we dig deeper. But my guts is telling me there more to him.”

  Earnes looked around the room. “He must have come here for something. It’s

  no coincidence he ended up in New York when he did, and in this house with those men. They are hiding something.”

  “That’s an extremely valid point, Agent Earnes,” Doctor Bailey gave the man a once over again. “And we are going to find it. We have to find out what he was involved in with those dead men.”

  Hendrick, the blood splatter specialist joined them. He held up an empty bottle

  of NyQuil in his gloved hand for them to see. “I found this under the sink in the bathroom, tucked away neatly in a corner. They probably held him captive in there, chained to the floor. The restrains and foot shackles are still there. He probably sneaked the bottle when the other guys weren’t watching him.”

  “He obviously tricked them into believing that he was going through with their

  sick plan.” Dr Bailey chuckled. “He’s a clever one for doing so! That explains the

  burned marks on the side of his leg. They handcuffed him to the heater as punishment.” He took the bottle and deposited it into an evidence bag, and sealed it. “We may be able to get some DNA samples and prints from it. Hopefully, there would be more there than this guy’s.”

  “Glad he had a change of heart,” Bowles told them. “That is certainly going to work to our advantage. Now that we have him in custody we will be able to find out what he knows, and who’s in charge. I doubt one of those dead idiots was.”

  “I wouldn’t count on him talking, Agent Bowles,” Dr. Bailey gave her a cynical look. “But we can always try. He may chose to side with his captors, no matter how much they had brutalized him.”

  “I see no reason why he wouldn’t want to tell us what he knows.” Bowles pointed out to him. “He was clearly held against his will. They beat the crap out of him, and from the look of it, they probably did it every day. That’s reason enough for him to come clean. And he doesn’t have a choice at this point. He isn’t going anywhere. I’m sure he will be more than happy to cooperate with us.”

  Dr. Bailey still wasn’t convinced. As a trained psychologist, he wanted them to know that they shouldn’t expect a lot too soon. “That may be so, Agent Bowles, but it may take some time—many in this man’s situation still feel an affinity to their captors. They remind loyal to them to the end, sometimes out of fear. Those men could have been dangling the safety and well being of his family members to get him to do what they want. We still don’t know how much he has been brainwashed by them. He may have agreed to join them willingly at the beginning, but his decision to stay with them could have been coerced by way of physical and mental torture.”

  “We have all the time to work on him!” There was a hard, determined look on

  Bowles’s face. “He knows something. We have to find out what it is. I don’t think they picked him up off the street and brought him here. He is up to his neck in whatever was going on here. My guts tell me that he isn’t a victim of his circumstances.”

  They were interrupted by Agent Loughlin, one of the agents who usually

  accompanied them on some of their covert missions. He wasn’t a regular member of the team, but he has worked with them extensively since the unit was created over four years ago.

  “You have to see this,” Agent Loughlin’s voice was passive.

  The look on his face told them that he had stumbled across something huge. And they suspected whatever Agent Loughlin had found couldn’t be good, either. They exchanged quick, guarded glances. They had been over the entire house twice, and each time they had found nothing out of the ordinary, well, except for the five dead men, and the battered one here. They followed Agent Loughlin and two other agents out the door, and down the flight of shaky stairs to the basement.

  They ended up in front of a storage closet. There were three locks on the door, that had been snapped off with the large bolt cutter that was lying on the floor. Agent Loughlin still had the bolt cutter in his hand. The stench coming from inside was overpowering. It was sickening as well, so much so that it took them completely by surprise.

  “Here, you will need these.” Loughlin handed them masks, and stood back,

  allowing them to enter the confined space.

  They didn’t know what to expect. They suspected it wasn’t a dirty bomb or

  anything of a chemical nature. The bomb squad had swept the entire house before

  they had been allowed to enter it. They had found nothing of an explosive nature.

  They were inside for less than a minute. It was enough time to give them a general idea of the situation. And it was dire, if not heart breaking.

  Dr Bailey was the first one out, and the first to speak. He pulled the mask from his face and stepped outside, leaning heavily against the wall for support. He lowered his head into his forearm and waited for the shock and dizziness to pass. There was a look of utter horror and
anger on his reddened face when he lifted his head. They had never known him to be this emotionally involved about something they had discovered on the job. He always maintained his stoic demeanor, no matter what, and they had chalked it up to his British upbringing.

  “My god!” He let out a deep sigh and threw the mask on the ground at his feet. He raised his foot and stomped on it. “My god!” he repeated again. “There are seven of them bundled in there. They most likely suffocated to death, or were poisoned. They haven’t been dead for that long—I will say about a week at most. Their bodies are in the early stages of decompose. And those men were living with that awful stench of their dead bodies! It pervaded the entire house when we walked in. We chalked it up to dead rodents or trapped raccoons. What kind of monsters are they! They were mere girls, no older than fifteen or sixteen! My daughter just celebrated her sixteenth birthday! I couldn’t imagine finding her here in this god forsaken, dreadful state! God, help us! This is a parent’s worst nightmare! Those poor girls had their whole lives ahead of them, and it was snuffed out by those heartless monsters masquerading themselves as humans! I would have killed those men myself if they hadn’t beaten me to it! A useless pile of garbage—the entire lot of them!”

  Dr. Bailey was visibly shaken, and he was infuriated.

  Agent Earnes was the next one to step out, followed by Agent Bowles.

  “Do you think they were runaways?” she asked, Earnes who was standing next to

  her. “Maybe no one had noticed them gone, and reported them missing. They must have been in the house for a while, months from the look of it. They appeared malnourished from what I can see of what’s left of their bodies. Their clothes are tattered and hanged on their thin bodies like loose sheets. They all seemed to be in their early to mid teens.” Bowles shook her head in dismay.

  She too was having a hard time wrapping her head around it. She didn’t expect something like this to happen in America, of all places.

  Earnes nodded his head in agreement. “Hopefully, we will be able to identify them. Something must have gone awry with their original plans for the girls. Maybe they had a difficult time sneaking them out of the country to Syria or Iraq,” Earnes told her, in a low voice.