Chapter 11 - THE CAMERA ABOVE HER BED
For one terrifying second, I believed Jason was inside Emily’s hospital room.
Then I noticed the clock behind her bed.
It showed 8:15.
The video was more than three hours old.
Jason wanted panic to control me.
“You don’t have her,” I said.
“Not yet.”
“Where is Sarah?”
“Place the card on the drain.”
I set the plastic case near the center of the empty pool.
A mechanical hum began above me.
The building’s old filtration system came alive.
Water poured from several wall vents.
The pool began filling.
“You have the card.”
“Release Sarah.”
Jason laughed softly.
“You still think this is an exchange.”
Water covered my shoes.
I moved toward the steps.
A metal security barrier dropped over the shallow end.
The doors above slammed shut.
Jason had trapped me inside.
“You were always the final piece, Michael.”
“He intended to drown you,” Sarah had told me.
Now I understood.
Jason planned to recover the card after my death.
The water climbed past my ankles.
I searched the tiled walls.
One vent was wider than the others.
Paul had warned Ortiz that abandoned pools often contained service tunnels.
I pulled a broken metal sign from the floor and struck the vent cover.
It did not move.
“Your daughter will remember you as a man who couldn’t save anyone,” Jason said through the phone.
I swung again.
A bolt snapped.
Water reached my knees.
“Emily saved Lucas.”
“She saved Sarah.”
“She beat you.”
His breathing changed.
It was the first sign that I had touched the fear beneath his control.
“She’s a thief.”
“She is ten years old.”
“And she saw exactly what you are.”
The line went silent.
I struck the vent a third time.
The cover broke free.
Behind it was a narrow passage.
I shoved myself inside as water rose around my waist.
A gunshot cracked from the upper level.
Then another.
Police lights flashed through the broken windows.
Ortiz’s team had entered early.
Paul had discovered a second transmitter hidden in the fake memory card case.
Jason had expected the card to send a signal when moved.
Ortiz used that same signal to identify his control room.
But Jason was not there.
The equipment operated remotely.
At the end of the service tunnel, I found a steel door.
Beyond it was a parking lot.
A sedan was disappearing around the corner.
Ortiz reached me seconds later.
“He got away.”
“What about Sarah?”
“We found the room from the video.”
“It was empty.”
She held up a phone recovered near the control equipment.
On its screen was a map.
A blinking red dot moved east along the highway.
Jason had left us a tracker.
May you like
Ortiz looked at the direction of travel.
“He wants us to follow him.”
