Chapter 3 - The Flight from Arlington
I slammed hard onto the wet cedar shingles of the deck roof, the impact knocking the breath from my lungs. Pain shot up my left ankle, but adrenaline swallowed it whole.
Mara caught my arm as I slid toward the edge, pulling me over the railing onto the lower patio.
"Are you hit?!" Mara shouted, her eyes frantically scanning my body for blood.
"No!" I gasped, clutching her tactical vest. "Noah! Mara, he has Noah! He’s at a private airstrip in Manassas!"
Mara’s jaw hardened. She grabbed my hand, dragging me across the rain-soaked lawn toward an unmarked black Dodge Charger idling in the shadow of the neighbor's hedge.
"Get in!" she ordered, shoving me into the passenger seat before sprinting around to the driver's side.
Inside the car, a police scanner crackled wildly with frantic radio chatter:
"Unit 4 to Command! Suspect 1 is down in the foyer! Suspect 2—Julian Vane—has breached the basement perimeter through the utility tunnel! I repeat, Vane is in the woods heading west!"
Mara slammed the Charger into reverse, tires screaming against the asphalt as we rocketed out of the cul-de-sac, swerving past arriving Virginia State Police cruisers.
"He got away?!" I screamed, turning around in my seat to look back at my burning, light-filled house.
"Julian Vane isn't just an embezzler, Elise," Mara said, her hands gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white as she accelerated down the dark country road. "He was top-tier MI6 before he went rogue eight years ago. He built a private mercenary network that specializes in corporate asset extraction."
Tears blurred my vision as the shock finally cracked through my defenses. "You knew? Mara, how long did you know?!"
"Forty-eight hours," Mara said, her voice laced with deep, agonizing guilt. "Quantico’s financial crimes division flagged a Swiss clearing account that tried to verify your father's old cryptographic key. When we traced the IP, it came back to a server router installed inside your house—registered under Caleb’s private IP address."
"Why didn't you tell me on Tuesday?!" I cried out. "Why did you let him stay in my house with my son?!"
"Because if we tipped him off before we located the buyer, Vane would have vanished into his deep-cover network and taken both you and Noah with him!" Mara shouted, her eyes fixed on the rain-slicked highway. "We needed to catch him in the act of initiating the vault transfer so we could freeze his global infrastructure!"
She reached into the center console, pulled out a small silver tablet, and tossed it into my lap.
"Look at the GPS feed," Mara instructed.
I picked up the tablet. A blinking red dot was moving rapidly along Route 28 toward the Manassas Regional Airport.
"Is that Caleb?" I asked.
"That's the tracker we planted on his secondary vehicle six hours ago," Mara revealed. "He didn't run into the woods to escape, Elise. He had a motorcycle stashed in the storm drain behind your garage. He’s heading straight for the airfield."
"We have to stop that plane!" I screamed, clutching the tablet.
"My team has already alerted the FAA to ground all private departures from Manassas," Mara said. "Two SWAT teams are setting up a blockade at the main hangar entrance."
Suddenly, the Charger’s dashboard radio crackled with an urgent dispatch from the FBI field unit in Manassas:
"Command, this is Manassas Detail! Primary Hangar 4 has been breached from the inside! A rogue Gulfstream G550 has bypassed air traffic control, cleared the taxiway without clearance, and is taking off on Runway 16 Left!"
My heart plummeted into a dark, endless void.
"No..." I whimpered, staring at the screen. "No, no, no!"
Mara slammed her hand against the steering wheel. "They didn't wait for Vane! The secondary team at the hangar launched the plane early!"
"Noah is on that plane!" I shrieked, grabbing Mara’s arm. "Mara, my baby is on that plane!"
"Look at the tablet, Elise!" Mara yelled, pointing a trembling finger at the glowing screen.
I looked down.
The blinking red dot tracking Caleb’s motorcycle hadn't gone to the airport terminal.
It had stopped at a secluded industrial park two miles south of the airfield—at a cold-storage warehouse facility owned by Sterling Defense Systems.
"He didn't put Noah on the flight," I whispered, sudden clarity washing over me. "The flight was a decoy to draw your tactical team away."
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"He’s using the old Sterling facility," Mara realized, her face turning pale. "He’s doing the biometric extraction right there."
Mara yanked the steering wheel to the left, the Charger sliding sideways across three lanes of traffic, roaring down the dark exit ramp toward the industrial park.
