The Cardinal Bird - Book 1: Reverse Harem Series (The Cardinal Series) Read online

  I frowned in thought.

  "We're turning in about five lights," Karl warned.

  He pointed out the correct intersection for me. I pulled it open, trying to mess with it. I was able to override the automatic controls that changed the lights by clicking and changing the signals for both directions. The very thing I had been so thankful for before was now our hindrance. I got ready.

  "Jace," I said. "I'm going to change the light to red right before we get to the intersection. The other light will already be green, so cars will be just taking off as we head through. Hopefully, this will be enough of a gap to block off our pursuit."

  He didn't say much in response, but he heard me.

  "The police are requesting more back-up now that reports are coming in of gunshots. They're starting to link it to the shootings at the hostel," CJ said.

  "See if you can reroute or answer some of those calls," Karl said. "It wouldn't do for them to send all of those people our way."

  "I don't speak Estonian." CJ asked to no one in particular, "Is it close to Russian?"

  "No," I said easily, timing the light. I switched both to green just as we were sailing through. "It's closer to Finnish."

  I couldn't see what was going on outside the windows, so I had Aleks and Brock relaying what they could to me.

  "There's a traffic jelly. All sides came to a stop in the middle," Aleks said.

  "Jam," Jace corrected even as he swerved the van around a slower-moving car. “A traffic jam.”

  "I saw the same," Brock said. "Can we make a turn? Ivanov's men had to dodge around the stopped traffic. There's a bigger space between us now."

  "Hold that thought," I said. "If there's a bigger distance, we should be able to do the same thing. Then we could probably make two turns and lose them completely."

  I pulled the same move, sooner this time, and we had to dodge around the traffic. However, both directions kept inching forward after they saw us going through. Brock was just able to clear before the intersection was a locked mass of growling metal and angry horns.

  After Aleks and Brock had relayed the good news, we made a few turns until Brock could no longer see them at all.

  "Callie," CJ said, "If I tell you the location of the police, could you lock down the traffic there?"

  I grinned. "I can do one better. They have to know we're headed to the airport by now. If not the authorities, then at the least Nikolai's men do. How far are we from the airport?"

  "Eight minutes," Karl said.

  I got to work.

  We sailed through the traffic light using our system that we had homed in by now. When I could see the sign for the international Estonian airport though the windshield, I started pulling up various intersections.

  I systematically started changing all of the lights to red for a few seconds to allow traffic to stop on all sides, before changing all of the lights to green. It was a few more steps and more time-consuming than just changing the lights to green straight away, but it would minimize high-speed accidents if people were taking off from a standstill in all directions. Then, I would move on to the next intersection.

  When I was finished with an intersection, it would start flashing red tripping some sort of internal alarm in the program's coding that recognized it was receiving conflicting commands. Somewhere, a computer engineer was probably getting an emergency call from his boss to come in and fix the haywire coding. Hopefully, we would be gone from the country before he made it in to do anything about tracing us.

  As I worked through the grid, the area surrounding the airport slowly lit up in an aura of flashing red with us safely on the other side of it from both Nikolai's men and the Estonian authorities.

  "Shit," Karl breathed out in awe after studying my actions, his breath rushing out and tickling the hair at my ear he was so close.

  "The police are tied up?" CJ said in confusion at what he was seeing on his screen before turning to study mine. He too let out a breath of shock when he saw what I had done. "Holy Batman, Byte-Syzed."

  "What?" Jace asked, alarmed.

  CJ shook his head, tried to speak, but then shook his head again.

  Karl spoke up instead. "She's locked up traffic all around the airport."

  Brock must have heard us through the speaker system in the van because he confirmed it. "It's completely clear behind us. Only a few stragglers. None of Ivanov's men."

  For extra safety, I set another ring of intersections to lock up behind us before logging out and removing traces of Jarvis Junior from the grid.

  "With the roads clear like this, we'll be at the airport in a couple of minutes," Jace said, accelerating. "Literally. New ETA: 2 minutes."

  "It'll give us six minutes to spare," Karl said, putting his phone to his ear. He glanced back at CJ and me. "It's a straight shot from here. Are you sure we're in the clear?"

  CJ nodded, but I pushed my lip in. "Most likely Ivanov will have men stationed at the airport."

  Karl smiled at me. "That's okay," he patted my head, ruffling my still knotted but clean hair. "We do too."

  I let out a breath, praying we made it past this one last obstacle.

  "Speaking of," Karl said, dialing. "I'm phoning ahead to them. Pack up everything and have it in your arms ready to go when we pull up to the jet."

  "Copy that. Nothing incriminating or irreplaceable in this van other than the stuff already packed up in the duffels," Brock said over the speakers.

  CJ got to work pulling apart hardware and wires to put into customized, silver cases. Jarvis Junior slowly disappeared into separate parts and snugged himself down into the black, high-density foam, crafted specifically for his dimensions.

  I remembered the first time I crossed the Atlantic. I tried my best not to think about the journey...suffocating, freezing, dark conditions...the last time I had been in America. After that trip was when I first started to develop claustrophobia. Of course, the tank pretty much sealed that deal. I'd been locked in a dark shipping container on a cargo ship for about a week...

  But Jarvis Junior? Jarvis Junior traveled like a king. There were even zip ties and compartments for each of his cords and wires.

  Color me impressed.

  To speed things along, I got busy helping dismantle Jarvis Junior. I was more than prepared to leave Europe and ready to help in any way that I could. It was sad that Nikolai had ruined such an amazing place for me.

  "We're pulling right up to the jets? No security? No returning the vans? No customs?" I asked in awe.

  "Nope," Karl said, popping the "p." His phone was wedged between his shoulder and ear. "Hey, Liev--" He was cut off by the person on the other side. "Look, I know we're running late. We had some trouble at the hostel.......yes.........snipers...Do I sound like I'm joking?.......... Well, we're coming in hot. Can you talk to the people at the fence?...... It doesn't matter, just get them to let us leave...no, we can't. It's no longer an option. We have to leave now......great, thanks. Oh—wait, Liev...also, check the area for hostiles. We have reliable intel that there could be people there waiting to ambush us.......just, just—they're reliable okay? Alright. Okay....thank you."

  Since we were going in a straight line now and all of the traffic was nearly nonexistent thanks to the traffic traps that had been set, it was somewhat easy to move around the back of the van without toppling over.

  We were wrapping the last set of wiring when the van decelerated just enough to notice.

  I glanced upfront through the windshield and saw that we were pulling up to a tall chain-link fence with wiring across the top.

  A man in a blue uniform stood next to a small, white building with glass windows on all sides. He stepped out of the building, eyes suspiciously traveling over the vans. He had to be seeing all of the nickel-sized dents peppered along the walls. Jace and Aleks rolled down the windows to help hide the nicks and dings, at least. It would probably look like the van was in a really bad horizontal hail storm due to the bullets not actually piercing anything.

  "Hey CJ," Karl asked, staring up through the windshield. "Did the police ever figure out that we were headed to the airport?"

  "I'm not sure," he said. "It was all in Estonian. The translator program isn't the best with that language. There were a lot of things being lost in translation."

  "Best guess?" Karl asked, tensing up just the slightest amount.

  I studied the security guard's actions. Even the smallest of movements could tell you something. I was trying to figure out if he was one of Nikolai's men.

  "Best guess," CJ said. "Well, no. There wasn't any mention of an airport in all of the chatter, or the computer would've notified me."

  "Hot words," I said, continuously impressed by him. Sort of like Google search analytics and CIA secret spyware, you could code a program to alarm you if certain words were used. Since we were headed to the airport, and that would not be a word generally lost in translation, it made sense that CJ had done so in the small amount of time that he'd had to work with.

  CJ sent me a shy smile. "Right. None of them ever mentioned the airport. And then after that, they were probably too busy trying to figure out what to do about Callie's traffic traps."

  "Okay," Karl said. "Let's just play this cool then. You good, Jace?"

  Jace nodded, pulling up next to the window. "Hello, there."

  Aleks, his rifle and gun gone...most likely packed away, though I'm not sure how I'd missed it...also greeted the man but in Russian, in case the man didn't speak English. The man didn't seem to like that though if the glare was anything to go by.

  "Ve not in Russia. Speak Estonia or speak English."

  Aleks switched to a slightly better English than the man. "Sorry. I thought this was an international airport."

  Karl subtly hit Aleks on the back of the head, out of view of the security.

  The man turned back to Jace. "Vat is vrong viss dis van?" his said brusquely in a thick accent.

  "Cheap rental," Aleks said with an innocent shrug.

  Right, innocent.

  "Destination?" the man asked.

  Karl leaned forward at this and pointed through the windshield. "That jet there."

  The man looked over his shoulder, radioing in to someone before nodding us through. "You almost miss flight." He pointed vaguely to others in the van behind us. "Van in back viss you?"

  "Yes," Jace said.

  "Customs on jet," the guard replied before showing us where to park so that we could take off without moving them out of the way.

  Jace started creeping forward as the man opened the gate.

  Aleks kept an eye on the mirrors to make sure that Brock made it through okay as well, but the man didn't even stop him.

  "Okay," Karl said. "We have four minutes to get in and get out of here. Get ready to haul."

  A pit formed in my stomach and my vision swam. I put my hand against the table to steady myself. "I don't have a passport."

  "That's okay," he said. "We have papers from the government to extradite you...well, not you specifically, but someone that we had been in contact with. It was surprisingly easier to get them to pass it on through once they found out it was to help bring down Ivanov."

  I was shocked to hear this. "I'm astounded that the officials you talked to weren't in Ivanov's back pocket."

  He smiled at me. "I guess we were just lucky."

  Jace pulled up to where the guard had instructed. "We're as close as we can get without having to wait for attendants to move the vans before takeoff. If there are snipers...duck and weave."

  That was his straight-laced advice given in a bored monotone. He could've been commenting on the weather or the latest game in the sports section.

  If there were snipers, duck and weave.

  Right. Okay.

  I glanced around. There was a large lake, sparkling in the distance. A couple of men were standing outside of the jet, hands in their pockets, but it was easy to tell that they weren't workers for the airport. Their clothing was too casual, too American. There was something else though. Both of the men, even as they seemed to try to portray a relaxed stance, had a lethal poise about them. It was in the way that their eyes moved around assessing their surroundings and the spark of awareness that most people don't have of the true dangers out there.

  Aleks and Jace jumped out while we shuffled, carrying the cases to the back of the van. Light spilled in as the doors opened making me dizzy and unfocused. Karl helped steady me as he picked up some cases as well. The two men that had been relaxing by the plane were there to pick up the last of Jarvis Junior's parts and file along with us to the boarding ramp.

  A quick glance showed Brock doing the same from the other van, large combat duffels slung over his broad shoulders like they weighed nothing.

  One of the new guys spoke up. He was older and had a brogue to his voice. "Is that everything?"

  Jace gave a nod.

  The short walk seemed to take forever, wondering if we were going to be shot at. It was such a long distance in my adrenaline-ridden brain that I actually had time to debate the pros and cons of ducking and weaving as Jace had advised.

  Nothing happened.

  Before I knew it, we were filing up the steps and into the air-conditioned cabin. The guys made short work of stowing away the cases in the overhead bins. I was ushered to a seat that probably more monetary worth than a mid-class car since this was a private jet on an international flight.

  Someone helped buckle me in, but I wasn't sure who.

  I thought that we would have customs officials board the plane to check us as the security guard had said, but I guess someone had radioed in that the guys were here on an official capacity with papers of extradition no less.

  Again, who were these people?

  There was a moment where we all listened through the open cockpit as one of the older guys communicated with Estonia's version of Air Control to see if we were cleared for take-off. It felt like the longest minute of my life.

  Had we made it in time?

  The entire jet seemed to hold its breath.

  An accented voice let us know that we were cleared for take-off.

  One of the new guys shut the door, and then we were taxiing down the strip. I guess even though we had a private tarmac to load on, the take-off and landing strips were shared. It had forced us to follow the packed schedule, but we had made it. Just in time.

  We were home-free.

  It was highly unlikely that Nikolai would be able to take us down now unless they had grenade launchers or something equally ridiculous. Not that they would use them. It would draw too much attention.

  I realized that I would be going back to America. I would be returning home. I wondered about Mom...Dad. I had thought about that fact before, but it just really seemed to hit me that I hadn't been in America since I was smuggled out so many years ago. I had been away for almost half of my life. Would they send me back to my home? Did I want that?

  Another wave of dizziness passed over me as we took off into the air.

  Did it matter? I was going to be free from Nikolai.

  As that thought passed through my mind, it was as if someone had just held the power button on my body. I let myself relax, and then that was all I remembered.