Chapter 6 - Voice on the Line
Mark reached into the locker, his leather gloves gripping the burner phone. The vibration buzzed against his palm like an electric current. He thumbed the accept button and brought the receiver to his ear, remaining completely silent.
"You took your time, Vance," the voice rasped. It was the same gravelly tone from the subterranean sorting room. The mechanic.
"Where is the kid?" Mark’s voice was barely a whisper, carrying the controlled steel of twelve years in transit law enforcement.
"In stable condition. My people have a field medic patching the chest puncture. If we left him in that city hospital, he wouldn't have made it through intake. The men who put that knife in him have clearance cards for every municipal facility in this county."
"Who are you?" Mark glanced at the flight pass in the courier pouch. The name printed on the weathered paper was Elena Vance.
Mark’s breath caught in his throat. His fingers locked rigid around the phone.
"You know the name on that pass," the man continued, breathing heavily on the other end, background noise indicating he was inside a moving vehicle. "Don't pretend you forgot your own sister, Mark. Even if she disappeared from manifest logs twenty-four years ago."
"My sister died in the Lake Michigan ferry fire," Mark said, his voice dropping into dangerous, low frequencies. "They found her coat. They closed the file."
"They closed an empty casket," the man answered coldly. "She spent two decades running transit routes for an intelligence contractor she shouldn't have trusted. Leo isn't just an abandoned kid in a terminal, Mark. He's the courier. What he swallowed before he went down on that concourse tile is worth fifty million dollars to the men who run the private terminal corridors."
Mark’s eyes widened. "Swallowed? Bennett said he was bleeding from a shiv wound."
"The stab wound was an attempt to cut it out of him before he cleared customs," the mechanic said. "They missed the capsule by two inches. But the capsule’s coating is dissolving. You have roughly four hours before the casing melts in his stomach lining and poisons his bloodstream."
"Tell me where you are," Mark demanded, taking a step toward the terminal exit, the pouch clutched tight to his chest.
"The old floatplane docks at Basin Point. Bring the documents inside that courier bag. Come alone, Mark. If your friends with badges show up, we dump the boy in the bay and disappear into the treeline."
The call terminated with an abrupt click.
Mark threw open the glass doors of the depot into the downpour. He sprinted back toward his cruiser. As he hit the unlock button on his key fob, the vehicle’s interior light flickered on.
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Inside the cruiser, Rex was not sitting on the front seat. The dog was backed into the footwell, growling furiously at a small black box magnetically attached to the underside of the steering column, its digital timer counting backward from 00:45.
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