Chapter 11: Steve's psyche

Steve Booth was uncomfortable.

A quiet man by nature, his life had become a veritable cacophony since the night Robert Wilmont had shot him. Although not antisocial, Steve reveled in his solitude. He appreciated silence — not as a lack of noise, but as a chance to reflect.

The bustle of the hospital was bad enough, but what he found when he was released was far worse. With three unemployed people and a teenager in his house, silence was non-existent.

To top things off, one of his new-found housemates insisted upon sleeping on the couch outside of his makeshift bedroom for the first three weeks he was home. Even after he convinced them that it was no longer necessary for them to watch his every move, Stephanie still slept outside his door every weekend and usually at least once during the week.

He rarely managed to spend even 15 minutes alone at the creek before someone came to spend time with him. It wasn't as if he wanted them to leave — although the thought had entered his mind — but he did want the ability to be by himself periodically.

The lack of privacy extended well past his inability to be alone. With no door on his den/bedroom, Steve was on constant display to anyone who passed his room. It was something he tried to get used to. And something at which he failed miserably.

Then there was the business.

He didn't mind sharing a place with people who made more money than he did. But the fact he had very little money coming in — coupled with the fact that Allison, Jane, and even Stephanie had recently come into substantial amounts of money — left him feeling inadequate. He was used to carrying his own weight, even though none of the women had mentioned anything negatively about money even once.

Still, he saw no ready solution to his dilemma. Allison, Jane, and especially Stephanie felt safe at his house. Despite his failure in dealing with Wilmont, they felt safe with him. He understood the mental trauma involved. He had gone through enough psych training in his former life that he had a realistic idea of what was going through each of his friend's head.

It just didn't make him feel any better about the situation.

The other problem plaguing Steve was his inactivity. It was almost four weeks after his release from the hospital before he could manage to walk 500 yards without stopping. Even now, a few months later, he could barely manage to complete a full workout without having to sleep for an hour or two.

Between his restlessness and the need for order in his life, Steve had a difficult time coping with life in his own home.

Gen. Whitley's visit was a boon to his mental state — until he started to speak. But at least he'd given Steve somewhere to focus his mental energy — even if it was the most unpleasant place Steve could imagine. Each time Steve tried to put aside Robert Wilmont, he reared his ugly head again. But Steve was determined to make a statement to anyone who might try to harm his friends again.

Assassination wasn't Steve's bag. He'd managed to avoid assignment to any "wet work" during his time in the military, preferring instead to use strategy and technological superiority in battle. Steve was better suited at lining his soldiers up against the other guy's and letting the better side — invariably Steve's — win. But that wasn't possible this time.

Oh, he didn't have any problem finding people willing to do the job. In fact, he had to turn away several former comrades-in-arms who practically begged for the chance to kill the asshole in France. It seems soldiers take a dim view of those who prey upon children — and a dimmer view of anyone foolish enough to mess with a kid under the protection of one of their own.

After a brief counsel of war, it was decided a flashy public death would serve their purposes better than a quick and quiet one. Jeannot Gilaumme was a public man who deserved a public killing. If only it was that easy.

While far from a recluse, Gilaumme treated security very seriously. He was always surrounded by bodyguards and rarely attended any event where the grounds weren't littered with men with guns. It took very little time to gain access to information about the public life of Jeannot Gilaumme, but finding anything about the man's private life was almost impossible.

It took three weeks of constant surveillance before they found his love nest outside of Paris. A few well-placed tips to the Parisian police went unheeded, so the group, which now numbered ten, was split and a plan was put into motion.

A group of seven commandos forced Gilaumme's vehicle off the road just outside of Orly on his way to his hideaway. A smaller group of the other three managed to infiltrate the slave-pit where Gilaumme held his captives. By the time the gunfire and explosives ended, seven of Gilaumme's bodyguards were dead or dying and Gilaumme was in the hands of two of Steve's former operatives.

True to his nature, Gilaumme tried to bargain his way out of his predicament — unsuccessfully — and the man's battered body was found staked to the ground inside the Parc de Princes stadium by groundskeepers on a Saturday morning.

Two things happened before Gilaumme was sent to meet his maker — he provided valuable contact information about others who supplied him with young flesh; and he managed to find four men willing to fulfill the contract to kidnap Stephanie Wilmont.

Four armed men grabbed a teenaged girl outside of Buckley High School and drove away toward what they considered to be a safe house in Midvale, 10 miles away. The men were to contact their go-between who would arrange for transport to Central America then to the drop off at a small, private airport near Paris.

Stephanie's rudimentary self-defense skills, along with those of her two friends, had managed to injure two of the attackers, although neither fatally. Still, a dislocated kneecap and a broken wrist were nothing to sneeze at.

The leader of the kidnappers managed to maintain discipline, if only barely, because the last thing he wanted was to lose the half million Euros that would be his payment for the capture. As it was the girl suffered a minor beating but he was able to keep his comrades from raping and killing the little bitch.

The contract was clear: extraction without injury. Nothing less would be accepted and failure would meet with quick death. The leader vowed not to fail in his mission. He'd been conducting this sort of operation for almost 10 years and only once had he missed a capture. In addition, death wasn't something he particularly looked forward to, especially since the money he'd receive would let him live a year of relative leisure on some tropical paradise.

But when he made his second call to his contact, things started to go awry. The contact told him he'd been unable to arrange a meeting time with the primary, so he wanted the leader to wait for another day before debarking for Columbia. A day later, the departure was pushed back again and the leader started to get uneasy. Two of his team members needed medical attention and the drugs he'd been able to secure were barely keeping them from screaming out each time they'd try to move.

Still, the safe house was relatively isolated and he doubted anyone would think to look so close to home for the girl. If he were dealing with anyone else, he might have been right.

Allison Cummings was almost catatonic. The only time she made any sound at all was to wail in despair at her failure to protect her niece. Allison wasn't the only one who failed. Two mercenaries hired to protect Stephanie were also too late to secure her release. Steve tried to tell Allison that there was enough blame to go around, but she refused to be mollified.

"If anyone is to blame, it's me," Steve told her. "It was my plan and it was a poor one. I thought with Guillame out of the way, we were in the clear. I was wrong and Stephanie is the one who has to pay."

Unfortunately for Allison, Steve had bigger worries — and Jane blamed Allison exclusively for her daughter's disappearance — so the former Sheriff of Buckley County was left to deal with her mental anguish alone.

She replayed the scene in her mind a thousand times and each time revised her actions in the scenario. Each time she failed in a different way and the harrowing result was the same: Stephanie was gone.

Steve's team in Paris had managed to learn of the plan to kidnap Stephanie during Guillame's vain attempts to bargain for his freedom, but the information didn't reach the proper people until the snatch was completed. Guillame had several cut-outs between him and the deed itself, of course. The man was nothing if not a fanatic about plausible deniability. It took almost two days after Stephanie's kidnapping for word to reach Guillaume's Paris hideaway.

A few well-placed sources at the NSA, thanks to provisions in the Patriot Act, were monitoring as many cell phone and e-mail transmissions from the area surrounding Buckley to any foreign nationals as possible. They were doing their best to track relays from exchanges connected to foreign nationals as well. But with literally hundreds of thousands of daily calls and messages, it took time.

Steve understood the reality of the situation. Gen. Whitley had an extraction team standing by to rescue the girl as soon as her location was determined. The hardest part, the most time-consuming part, was finding out where the girl had been stashed. Steve only hoped the girl wasn't already out of the country.

Trpr. McClung had arranged for almost round-the-clock helicopter surveillance within a hundred mile radius to look for the dark SUV that grabbed the girl. It took only five hours to find the vehicle abandoned on a gas-well road a few miles outside of Buckley. A forensics team found traces of ATV tracks nearby and a canine search-and-rescue team followed the scent to another location two miles away.