JACE
The highway north through Indiana is lined with fields of dead corn stalks cut down after harvest on both sides of the road. I keep the truck at a steady seventy miles per hour while Sabine sits in the passenger seat with her lap covered in cell phones and charging cables. We left North Carolina two days ago after the confrontation with Captain Bryan at the storage facility, and now we're heading back toward Chicago with a truck full of evidence and a target list that continues to shrink.
The first week of December brings cold weather and gray skies that match my mood, and the heater struggles to keep the cab warm against the chill seeping through the poorly sealed windows. Sabine has been quiet for most of the drive, focused entirely on the task of charging and searching through every single phone we recovered from Bryan's storage unit. She started with the oldest models and worked her way forward chronologically.
I give her space because she needs it. The encounter with Bryan shook her badly, and the bruises on her throat have turned frompurple to a sickly yellow-green around the edges over the past few days, but the psychological impact runs deeper than her physical injuries. She wakes from nightmares most nights and spends hours staring at nothing, lost in memories I can't reach or erase. The phones give her something concrete to focus on instead of the thoughts that threaten to consume her.
Edinburgh appears on the highway signs, and I take the exit that leads toward Camp Atterbury. The military installation sprawls across thousands of acres of Indiana countryside, and our target lives somewhere in the civilian housing that surrounds the base. Number ten on the list is a woman named Hannah Frank who left active duty two years ago and now works as a civilian instructor training special-ops teams in counter-surveillance techniques.
According to the information Sabine pulled from her breach of the military database, Frank was part of the unit in Syria and witnessed everything that went wrong during the unauthorized mission. She kept her mouth shut when they returned to the States, accepted her discharge honorably, and moved on with her life. Now Bryan wants her dead because she knows too much and could destroy him if she ever decides to talk.
I glance over at Sabine and see her hunched over another phone, swiping through images and videos robotically. She's been at this for hours without a break, and I wonder how much longer she can maintain the focus before exhaustion forces her to stop.
My own mind drifts to the problem of Vittorio Barone and how I'm going to survive the inevitable confrontation when he discovers I didn't complete the contract he gave me for the second time. I'm on a losing streak and it's put me on a crash course with the most dangerous man in the city.
But I have digital copies of every contract Barone's given me over the past decade, complete with names, dates, payment records, and transaction histories. I have emails and text messages that prove he ordered the deaths of hundreds of people, politicians and businessmen and rivals who stood in the way of his ambitions. And I have the encrypted correspondence with the broker who arranged this twelve-man contract, the one that brought me to Sabine in the first place.
The key is having someone I trust hold a copy with instructions to release it if anything happens to me. I know exactly whom to ask. Lucas has been inside the Barone family for fifteen years. He's clean on paper, respectable, and smart enough to understand when keeping information safe serves his own interests. And Barone has no idea I'm tight with him or that he'll have my back if it goes pear-shaped.
I'll give Lucas everything—the files, the encryption codes, the instructions for what to do if I disappear or turn up dead. And I'll make sure Barone knows that killing me means exposing his entire operation to federal investigators who'd love nothing more than to bring down one of Chicago's most powerful crime bosses.
The plan's not foolproof. Barone could decide that eliminating me is worth the risk of exposure, or he could try to find my confidential stash buddy and eliminate him before the information can be released. But it's the best option I have, and it gives me a fighting chance at survival when most people who cross Barone end up in shallow graves or at the bottom of Lake Michigan.
"Jace." Sabine's voice pulls me from my thoughts, and I glance over to see her staring at the phone in her hands with an expression that makes my stomach drop. "I found something."
I slow the truck and pull onto the shoulder of the highway, putting it in park so I can give her my full attention. "What is it?"
She doesn't answer immediately. Instead, she turns the phone toward me and presses play on a video that starts with darkness and muffled sounds. The image stabilizes after a few seconds, revealing a bedroom that looks like a military bunk or something. A woman lies on a bed with her eyes closed, and it takes me a moment to realize she is likely unconscious.
Captain Bryan enters the frame and my hands clench on the steering wheel. He stalks forward like he owns the place, and what happens next makes rage burn through my chest with an intensity that threatens to consume rational thought.
The video is graphic and brutal and leaves no doubt about what Bryan is doing. The woman doesn't wake during the assault, and when Bryan finishes he adjusts his uniform and leaves the frame without checking whether she's even breathing. The video continues for another minute before cutting to black, and I realize he recorded the entire thing deliberately.
"That's not you," I say in monotone, because I can't trust myself to express the fury churning through me without losing control. "Who is she?"
"Hannah Frank." Sabine's voice is hollow and distant. "The woman we're going to talk to now. I had no idea this happened, Jace…" Her eyes stare blankly at me, like it's registering to her for the first time that Jason Bryan is a serial rapist and that she wasn't the only victim.
The revelation makes breathing difficult. Bryan didn't just rape Sabine. He's been doing this for years, collecting videos and photographs of his assaults and storing them away wherenobody would find them. The phones we recovered from his storage unit contain evidence of multiple crimes against multiple victims, and every single one of them proves that Bryan's exactly the monster Sabine has been saying he is.
"There are more videos." Sabine scrolls through the phone, and I see thumbnails of other recordings, other women, other assaults recorded much like the one I just saw, which I wish I’d never seen. "I haven't watched all of them yet, but there are at least a dozen across the different phones. Some of the women, I recognize from our unit. Others, I don't know."
The hatred I feel toward Bryan intensifies until it becomes a physical presence in the truck cab, and I have to force myself to breathe slowly and maintain control. Killing him would be easy. Finding him and putting a bullet in his head would satisfy the primal need for vengeance that screams through my nervous system.
But Sabine needs him alive long enough to face justice through proper channels, to be exposed publicly and destroyed professionally before he dies.
"This backs up your claim substantially." I keep my voice steady despite the rage threatening to break through. "A jury will see this video and understand that you were telling the truth about what he did to you. Defense attorneys can't argue that you made it up or that it was consensual when there's video evidence of him assaulting an unconscious woman."
"I know." Sabine sets the phone down and wraps her arms around herself. "But knowing he did this to Hannah too makes it worse somehow. I thought the only reason he did this to me was to threaten me into silence about Afghanistan… He's been doing this for years."
I reach over and take her hand, squeezing gently. "We're gonna stop him. We are going to make sure he faces consequences for everything he's done, and then I'm going to make sure he never hurts anyone again."
Sabine turns her head to look at me with eyes that are red-rimmed but clear. "Hannah deserves to know the truth about him. And she deserves the chance to help us take him down."
"Then we'll tell her." I put the truck back in gear and pull onto the highway, accelerating until we merge with traffic heading toward Edinburgh.
This sick fucker really has some nerve thinking he deserves any job at all, let alone a promotion to Major. He has no regard for life, and I will personally see to it that he gets taken down for what he's done.
22
