Secrets in the Storm Read online

  We had been silent until that point, but the idea that someone was still in the lodge seemed far-fetched since there were no cars in the lot and the place was completely silent. Jeremy risked speaking. “We’re about to hit the guest rooms.”

  “I hope we find something soon,” I said. “The suspense is killing me.”

  He smirked, then said, “Be careful what you wish for.”

  I shook my head and smirked right back. As he rushed forward into the first room, I covered him, following close behind as we cleared each nook and cranny. I went first into the next room, and he covered me. Each time he brushed past me, a rush of heat and excitement raced through me. I loved working with him. His presence alone made me feel comfort and safety with every op we worked on together, even when it was only his voice I heard over my com.

  We repeated that process eight more times through the lower level guest rooms, and while I was anxious to find the intruders and take them down, the excitement of the search filled me.

  The bottom floor was clear. Jeremy signaled toward the second floor and I nodded silently. We took the stairs one at a time. We moved like cats, silent and deadly, seeking our prey. It had only been a few minutes since we’d entered the resort, but it seemed we were taking a very long time. Near the top, a stair creaked as Jeremy stepped on it. We froze, listening for any type of movement above or below. My heart pounded loud in my ears, making it hard to hear anything else.

  When we heard nothing after a few seconds, we continued to the top and checked the rooms, one by one, still almost silent in our search. Finally, we got to the first suite. The room was spacious with a table and chairs, a nook with two arm chairs and two large sofas along with a large bed, dresser and night stands. I gave Jeremy a thumbs up and he waggled his eyebrows at me and whispered, “There’s one of these with your name on it.”

  Tonight was going to be amazing in this place, and the thought occurred to me that it was big enough that maybe we could get away with only cleaning one suite. “This is big enough for both of us.”

  He grinned, a mischievous grin glancing toward the bed. I reached up and taking his jaw in my hand, twisted his head toward the couch. I stifled a laugh, and he frowned before grinning at me. We slinked out of the room, the wide hall still clear. A yawning shiver raced up my spine as we walked toward the next suite. My spidey senses had suddenly come alive. My hand shot out and grabbed Jeremy’s arm. He stopped. I shook my head in warning. Whatever we were looking for, it was close. He gave me a trusting look and approached the door with caution. The area right outside the door was almost devoid of dust. This was it. It had to be.

  The door was locked, unlike all the others. We listened for about fifteen seconds for any sounds to come from the room. There was nothing. I made quick work of undoing the old fashioned locks with my bobby pins, and we stormed inside like we were facing down an entire army.

  Silence filled our ears, and the smell of chemicals and metals assaulted us. Nothing was covered with plastic or sheets like all the other rooms, and a lot of the furniture had been moved into one corner. Tiny pieces of wire, plastics, empty containers, butane burners, fuel cartridges, and general debris littered the room. The walls were darkened by more than just dust, and one wall had conspicuous white rectangles all over it as if some things were recently removed and were now gone. I put my hand to my mouth and nose and then brought my shirt up to cover them, hoping to stop the burn that found my throat.

  Jeremy’s eyes found mine as we realized the terrible truth at the same time.

  “Bombs.”

  “It doesn’t look like a professional either.” I picked up a burned piece of wire. “Messy and unorganized.” I went straight for the trash can and dumped out the contents onto the floor, all thoughts of protecting my throat vanishing as the fumes and smells left the room through the open door. Jeremy headed for the fireplace where he sifted through some burned papers.

  “There’s a slight heat coming off this fireplace, Christy. Very slight, but it’s there. If I had to guess, this fire is less than a couple hours old.”

  We both stood and carefully made our way to the bathroom and closets to make sure we were alone. Normally, in a situation like this, we would have cleared the entire room and building before stopping to look at clues and evidence, but the sight was so shocking—and this was Jeremy’s family’s place. It was all too incredible, and we had been stupid to stop. It put us at great risk.

  Both the closets and bathroom were empty. We checked the last four suites down the hallway, and after we saw they were clear, we headed back to the room. I picked through the newspapers from the trash. “I’ve got newspapers that go back weeks, but none for today. They’re all the Calgary Herald.”

  “So, whoever these people are, they go into town every day?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “So they’ll be back…” Jeremy stopped right there, but kept sifting through the refuse, picking out pieces of paper.

  “I don’t know. I mean, it seems like they cleaned the place up a bit.”

  Jeremy snorted.

  I scanned the room. A warm fire. No new, unused materials. “If you were going to come back here, would you take the bomb with you when you left? There’s no bomb, or partial bomb for that matter.” The room wasn’t clean by any means, but the bomb makers had taken anything and everything that they had used to make the bomb or bombs.

  “True. And whatever was on the walls—plans, bomb diagrams, pictures of targets—they’ve all been removed.”

  “I would wager that this little group of six managed to make their bomb, and they’re now moving on to the next phase of their plan.”

  “You don’t think it’s going down right now?” Concern creased Jeremy’s brow. “Maybe they’re just getting into position and plan to act it out tomorrow or next week or even next month.” He ran his hand, now black from ash, through his tousled hair, the hint of a large bicep pressed on the arms of his T-shirt.

  “They weren’t afraid of someone finding this stuff. That tells me they’re going to act fast.”

  Chapter 3

  My attention was drawn to a few cash receipts for burner phones from different stores in Calgary as well as a few small pieces of metal and colorful wire coating in the debris that had been in the small glass garbage can. “Looky here. Burner phones.” I held up an empty box for a cell phone.

  “Either used for communication or detonation.”

  I nodded.

  “These burnt papers are pictures,” Jeremy said, as he carefully looked through them. “I’ve got bits and pieces of them.”

  “What of?” I moved toward him.

  “All sorts of random things.” He held up a partial picture of a bright blue bench with flowers on it. “I think this is one of the benches in downtown Calgary. A few years back some charity organization started leaving these benches in different spots around the city, all different colors and patterns on them—each one unique. They wanted to encourage people to take a seat and enjoy Calgary.”

  “Hmm. Cool idea. Could be a spot for a bomb, I guess. But getting the right person to sit on it at the right time…now that would be a feat.”

  “Yeah, especially because the benches move from time to time—if the business doesn’t want them, they’re supposed to move the bench to a new location. It’s part of the charm of C-Town.”

  I picked up one of the only slightly burned pictures. A dark wooden door. Above it was a golden plaque, but what had been on the plaque had been burned away. “This door look familiar? Something else downtown?” As I showed it to him I noticed a string of letters and numbers on the back of the picture.

  He grimaced. “No idea.” He stood with a stack of pictures and went to the wall. He held up a picture and ran his finger over a pin hole at the top of one. “I’m pretty sure these were on the wall.”

  We both looked at the dust outlines on the walls. Jeremy slid his hands over a couple of them. “There are pin marks on the walls, and th
at’s dust marking the outline of pictures.” The darkness within the squares and around them varied. Some darker than others. So the pictures weren’t put on the wall at the same time.

  “And judging by the newspapers, they were working here for a little over three weeks.”

  “We better get into town and alert the authorities.”

  I set the one picture down and picked up another one. It also had a combination of letters and numbers on the back. It was a picture of a bench. If they were coded messages, I needed to look at all of them at the same time. I absently started laying the pictures out on a table, upside down, the code showing. “You mean you better.” I gave him an exasperated look and paused what I was doing.

  “What?”

  “I can’t be with you.” I groaned and put my hand on my hip. “And I don’t know how you’ll explain your presence here if Division finds out.”

  He sighed, his breath escaping through his nose. “You’re right.”

  “Looks like this won’t be as relaxing as we’d hoped.” My shoulders slumped in realization. I continued to put the pictures out in rows, creating a grid and trying to figure out what the codes meant. While every picture had a code on it, the three that showed up most often were,

  5102 50.0-1140425.700

  MEL51.0486151-114.070845900EK

  AHM51.0486151-114.070845900ED

  The others were close to those three, but not exactly the same. No codes that I knew followed the same pattern.

  “We’ve got to figure out what these codes mean.”

  “Hold on,” Jeremy interrupted my thoughts. “You know we can’t get involved.” The strong features of his handsome face sharpened. “We’ll give the information to the police and let them take care of it—actually, maybe we ought to give it to the local Canadian Security Intelligence Service. I could slip on a disguise and drop off the information we collected then hope they are able to avert a tragedy.”

  I felt a little sick. “I wish we could involve Division. I’m not super familiar with the CSIS and how effective they are.”

  “The CSIS is very comparable to the FBI. But we can’t involve Division.”

  “I know.” Not unless we wanted to lose our jobs. I flipped the partially burned pictures over to see if there were any patterns in the pictures. One pattern popped out immediately. All the MEL and AHM codes were assigned to benches. The other pictures were of all sorts of things, some completely undistinguishable to me “Anything familiar?”

  “They’re pictures of pretty common things,” he said, pointing to a picture of wide cement stairs. “Take this. They could be stairs from just about anywhere. Not sure. These look like drain covers. Do you know how many drains there are in Calgary proper?”

  The pictures only showed very small sections of what was originally there. Some were burned so badly, that we couldn’t make anything out. If the hit was going down in Calgary and these pictures were of places and things there, Jeremy would be the best person to identify them. Calgary was where he’d grown up. “There are a lot of those bench pictures.”

  He pulled another picture with a bigger portion of a bench out of the stack and put it with the others. “It’s possible there could be benches like this somewhere else and I just don’t know it, but since we’re so close to Calgary, my guess is that they’re all there.”

  “Do you think these are all pictures from Calgary?” I asked, waving my hand over the pictures. “Is this happening in Calgary?”

  “I can’t be sure until I check the pictures against what I think these are, but they could be. It seems the likely place since they were meeting here and traveling into town every day.” He indicated the newspapers I had left stacked on the ground.

  A few of the pictures showed partial faces, some feminine and some masculine—some with brown skin and others white. Unfortunately, the pictures were too burned to make identification easy. “Why would someone be targeting Calgary?”

  He grunted. “I don’t know. It’s strange—almost nothing terrible happens here. It’s a very peaceful city.” He squished up his nose like he’d smelled something bad.

  “That will be a piece of cake for CSIS.”

  Out of habit, I pulled out my phone to surf the internet. I frowned. “We need to get into town so that I can research a bit. No internet.” I held up my phone to him. I was itching to get involved, but one look at Jeremy scanning the room, his soft brown eyes sad and worried, the rounding of his shoulders in defeat, reminded me that his family owned this place. “Sorry about this room.” I pulled him into a hug. “It’s going to need to be completely overhauled. I’m sure having a crime scene at your lodge won’t help when you’re trying to open it back up.”

  “These days it might help—people love sensationalism. But yeah, my brother isn’t going to like it when I tell him. At least it’s localized to this one room. Let’s go into town. I’ll turn the stuff in so we can hopefully stop whatever this is and you can get the supplies we need to rough it out in the lodge. We can’t forget water.” Jeremy grinned.

  It would not be rough. This place was extravagant despite the dust. And with all the supplies we saw downstairs, we’d be able to make quick work of it too. A large part of me couldn’t stand the idea of not getting involved with stopping the bombers. “What if instead of giving the CSIS the information, we go ahead and find the bad guys and take care of them ourselves?” I pumped my eyebrows up and down.

  Jeremy started packing up a bunch of evidence and taking pictures. “Because that worked so well in Florida.” His chin tilted down, and his eyes turned into lasers staring me down.

  I huffed. “Fine, but I hate pretending not to know about it.” The pull to find out exactly what was going down was yanking at my insides.

  “I know,” Jeremy said, gathering up all the photos. “But it has to be this way.”

  “They’re going to want to come out here.” Our prints would lead them nowhere, of course. After Florida, Ace had rigged the system to give no results if either of our prints were discovered, and he would get an alert that someone was snooping. The question was, would they send a team today or would they wait until tomorrow? The possibility of a retreat here together was getting slimmer and slimmer.

  Even worse, I imagined CSIS agents crawling all over the building by nightfall while the terrorists carried out their plans forty-five minutes away in Calgary.

  “Maybe we can give them enough evidence to keep them busy in town for today and tomorrow. If we do a good enough job in collecting evidence for them, I might be able to convince them that the threat is imminent and going out to the site would be a waste of time at this point—that they should focus on where the bombers are right now.”

  “That’s what we would do—eliminate the imminent threat, but when government bureaucracy is involved, that never happens. They end up always being too late for the real party because they have to analyze everything.” I knew there was no hope of us being involved, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “You need to have more faith in people. The CSIS are the best ones for the job, trust me.” In quick order, he snapped a bunch of pictures, and I helped him gather the things with the most promise to lead quickly to the perpetrators and left the rest untouched. He found a couple pretty good fingerprints on an empty bottle or two, and I collected them with a small kit from my go bag.

  We scooped everything we could find into the three trash containers in the room to give the CSIS and hurried back out to the helicopter. Once we were inside, Max started the engine and a few minutes later we were up in the sky. To the west, dark clouds seemed to be coming our way. “I thought you guys needed supplies from town,” Max said. “I didn’t realize you would be transporting anything from the lodge.” He laughed.

  “We didn’t know either,” Jeremy said. “I hope it’s okay. It doesn’t weigh much.”

  “It’s no problem. I was surprised, that’s all. This may be a bumpy ride. They upgraded the storm advisory to a watch and there’s chatte
r that it’s about to turn into a warning. That would mean the threat is imminent.”

  “What exactly is the threat?” Jeremy asked, adjusting his headset.

  “Flash flooding, hail, wind. Your run-of-the-mill summer flash storm here in Calgary.” A strange, high pitched laugh sounded in our ears. Was Max getting a bit hysterical?

  Weather facts for Calgary and all of Canada poured into my mind from websites I’d visited while studying weather patterns of the world in sixth grade. Calgary was known for its crazy weather patterns. These types of flash storms tended to come quick, hit hard, and leave in a flash. The storm certainly wouldn’t be a blizzard or an ice storm. It was too warm, but hail was a possibility, and the idea of flash flooding made me cringe. My one consolation was that if a storm did hit, it would likely help deter any CSIS agents from going to the lodge—if the two of us ever got back there. It was a selfish thought, but one bright spot in this whole thing.

  Jeremy gave the pilot the new coordinates that would take us to the CSIS’s landing pad. “Oh, look down, you’ll be able to see the river and the new bridge.” I looked out over the wide rushing river and the new bridge that would hopefully breathe life into the lodge come fall. The bridge spanned a distance much wider than the flowing river and even the banks, it had been raised up a good fifteen feet off the ground with large cement pillars, making the bridge even longer. They obviously wanted to prevent it from washing out again.

  The dark clouds chased us as we flew, and they seemed to be gaining on us. We rocked to and fro, and my stomach lurched along with the helicopter. The helicopter bumped and bounced and the red light that told us the pilot needed to talk to us blinked. Jeremy flipped the switch to hear what the pilot had to say.

  “Hey guys, I’m really sorry, I know this hasn’t been a smooth ride, but this storm is coming in faster than they anticipated. While it hasn’t hit Calgary yet, this storm is rushing through two of the counties west of it and causing all kinds of havoc. They’ve issued flash flood warnings for those towns. I’m going to try to hit Calgary from the South in hopes of going around and beating the storm. If I were the two of you, I’d get a hotel room and stay in town tonight. I’ve ordered a car service to pick you up. Would you like me to have them meet you outside the CSIS building?”