The Keeper Returns (The Wallis Jones Series Book 3) Read online

  The Keeper Returns

  The Wallis Jones Series, Book Three

  Martha Carr

  MRC Publishing

  Contents

  The Keeper Returns

  Dedication

  Want More?

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Sneak Preview - The Circle Rises

  Martha’s Notes

  The Keeper Returns

  A Thriller

  Third in the Wallis Jones Series

  Martha Carr

  MRC

  Central Texas

  Copyright ©2016 by Martha Carr

  Published by Martha Carr

  Texas

  All rights reserved. No part of this book can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

  The Keeper Returns by Martha Carr is a novel and a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, dialogue, locations and plot are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Dave Robbins

  Created with Vellum

  To all those who love to read and like a good puzzle inside of a good story with some characters you can get to know over an entire series.

  Dedicated to Don Allison, whose guidance in life and literature have helped so much.

  To Dave Robbins and Brian Fischer for donating your time and your talents so generously. Forever grateful for your friendships.

  To Michael Bingham-Hawk for a great website and so much more.

  To Michael Anderle for his generosity to all of his fellow authors.

  And to my amazing son, Louie and the wonderful Katie who have been so supportive throughout this project.

  Want more?

  Join the email list here:

  http://wallisjonesseries.com/newsletter/

  Join the Facebook Group Here:

  fb.me/WallisJonesSeries

  The email list will be a way to share upcoming news and let you know about giveaways and other fun stuff. (Hard at work on an app with different endings and a cool side story to the series). The Facebook group is a way for us to connect faster – in other words, a chat, plus a way to share new spy tools, ways to keep your information safe, and other cool information and stories. Plus, from time to time I’ll share other great indie authors’ upcoming thrillers. Signing up for the email list is an easy way to ensure you receive all of the big news and make sure you don’t miss any major releases or updates.

  I hope you enjoy the book!

  Martha Carr 2016

  Chapter One

  Harry Weiskopf was reading when he heard the quiet pops followed by something heavy hitting the floor. There was only one cry for help and it had sounded more like a yelp of surprise than anything else.

  He had stood up, wondering if he should prepare himself for something but beyond that there wasn’t much else he could do.

  His room was in the basement and only measured twenty feet by twenty feet. A big square. Many of the houses in Central Florida were built on reclaimed swamp land and relatively few neighborhoods had basements. No one suspected he was there. That’s what made it the perfect prison.

  There were certain geographic features about the house that made the location desirable as well, given its purpose, and kept at least one side relatively hard for someone to casually stroll up and say hello. The house was on a lake, which kept any kind of passing traffic to a minimum. There was also a discreet camera and sensor system that showed when someone was entering the grounds. The inside of the house was wired from end to end as well.

  Sometimes Harry took to talking directly to one of the cameras in the room, giving a lecture on whatever was on his mind.

  He could only reason that there was good insulation and sound dampening material, maybe a good air filtration system for the basement because there were no windows. All the hours he had to observe the few details he had right around him led him to believe he was breathing air circulated by the filtration system.

  His room was most likely largely isolated from the main house upstairs and had very heavy walls and ceilings reinforced by steel. A guard had even mentioned there was a generator in case electricity went out during the frequent thunderstorms or occasional hurricanes.

  The downside to a lake style house would be that the neighbors would typically be out and would most likely mingle with the people occupying the house. Harry sometimes wondered how they dealt with that problem but he couldn’t get anyone to tell him. He wondered if perhaps an entire family lived right above him.

  The only time he saw his guards, though was when they brought him something or just randomly checked on him. They never said much of anything.

  Maybe they were afraid he’d start yelling for attention and never stop. The thought had occurred to him.

  For the most part, he had noted when they first arrived, for the few moments he was outside that the house blended easily into the neighborhood.

  The basement was completely hidden from the outside world. No windows or obvious doors and the entrance to Harry’s room was hidden inside of the house, accessible inside of what had seemed like a closet when they escorted him inside and shut the door behind him.

  The room, his prison cell buried in the middle of suburbia was bare of anything but the essentials to let him sleep or sit at a desk and all of that was nailed to the floor or the walls. It was like being permanently entombed in a Motel 6 but without the complimentary newspaper at his door.

  He wasn’t to be trusted with anything more than an outdated paperback book or an old magazine and even those were all tagged and numbered.

  Pop, pop. More sounds and feet moving quickly in his direction.

  He glanced at the nearby wall where he had been keeping track of the days by marks, tucked back in a corner. Anger quickly took him over with the thought of how he had tried to pass so many hours knowing there would never be any real change. Not for him, not after what he had done.

  “It looks like change has found me,” he whispered, not wanting to get involved just yet in whatever might be headed his way. A small giggle escaped him.

  “Get down,” yelled someone and Harry fell to the floor behind the bed without even looking to see who had said it. He couldn’t even be sure they had meant him.

  The door splintered with the first shots through the reinforced wood and steel. When they built this fortress the creators had probably never envisioned someone getting this far. Just then, an enforcer, a long, solid battering ram came splintering through, quickly followed by four men who surveyed the room for a moment.

  Harry was still on the ground, barely peeking over the bed.

  “You alone?” asked one of the men. Harry nodded his head, unable to do
much more. They quickly stepped toward him and scooped him under the armpits, pulling him to his feet and half-carrying him toward the remains of the door.

  There wasn’t time to grab a jacket. Harry Weiskopf didn’t care. He was getting out of that room.

  They were shoving him quickly along the hallway toward what he remembered as the front door. Once he was placed inside that room, 745 days ago, all he had seen beyond it were glimpses of the hallway when they had brought him food or done wellness checks. Now, he was whisking past the pale grey walls being carried along by new faces.

  His makeshift prison, as it turned out, sat on a fairly busy street along what counted for a main street in Bartow, Florida, population 17,545 people, including the elderly snowbirds from much further north. People who couldn’t let go of their family or friends but had enough of trying to navigate ice or snow.

  At first they had held him on an estate along River Road in Richmond, Virginia until the house in Bartow was ready for him. That place had been nicer, he thought. The window had a nice view of the James River and the decor was more thoughtful.

  Old money chic. Everything was well-made and showed generations of careful wear.

  Occasionally, the elderly owner had stopped by to talk to him about what had happened, asking him for more details about who he had talked to in Management.

  Harry had enjoyed the visits with the old man, Thornton somebody. It was hard to remember anymore. At first, Harry had been reluctant to say much, in case he would have to look at how he had helped to plot something even he was unaware of till it all came out in the open.

  Isn’t that what Norman had kept shouting at him?

  Harry’s mind played a lot of tricks on him lately. Memories came and went and seemed to blend together with nothing new to really break them up anymore or distract him from just the passing of hours.

  Thornton had been kind to him though, and over time Harry had started to trust him and told him everything he knew. He had even worked at trying to remember more details. Names, dates and things he overheard in case they were important. Maybe this was his way to not only redeem himself but get out of that room in Richmond and actually get to go back home to Florida. He looked forward to Thornton’s visits and tried not to pepper him with too many questions about what was going on outside in the world. Thornton had seemed reluctant to say too much, anyway and Harry didn’t want to ruin things. He lived for their meetings.

  They had even talked a little about learning how to accept things and find some peace. It wasn’t too long though before all of the visits from Thornton stopped and he was left with just the guards. That’s when he was abruptly moved. He wasn’t sure what day of the week it was when they came to get him, he never was. The guards had told him to get up and follow them. He tried to get his clothes but they said someone else would see that his things were moved, such as they were.

  All he had were some toiletries, a small wardrobe and a picture of his family when the brothers were all in their twenties and their parents were still alive. A woman, Esther and her husband, Herman were also in the picture. Harry had known them his entire life. They owned a bookstore in Richmond now, at least he thought so. He had lost touch with them a long time ago.

  He tried to ask about Thornton and where he was going but no one would answer him until they were on the plane. Bartow, Florida, final stop.

  Someone must have decided he was too close to where so many people had died. Too close to his brother, he thought. That was probably the real reason.

  He was just starting to feel a small amount of acceptance at his fate in the upscale prison when they had dragged him off to Bartow on a private plane.

  Bartow, Florida, named for the first Confederate officer to become a martyr, thought Harry, just like me.

  Harry knew a lot of facts and figures from the old magazines and books his guards would allow him to read. There was nothing else to do. He was seen as a threat to national security and wasn’t allowed to have access to any kind of real-time news. Everything he knew about the world pre-dated the last two years.

  He had felt some remorse when he was first deposited on that estate in Richmond. His mind kept whirling, stuck on what he had done to so many people.

  But it wasn’t long before the tedious days started to string together and he saw how they had decided to blame him for everything. No trial, no jury and worst of all, no visitors.

  The thought made him bitter in equal measures with a sense of pride that he had finally shown his brothers, Norman and Tom that he could do something on his own that made a real difference.

  “I have no family,” he muttered as they hurried him along outside.

  “Street clear?” asked the older man. He was clearly in charge, thought Harry. The oversized men that surrounded Harry looked nervous even as they kept moving efficiently through the large, Spanish style house that had been Harry’s prison. Not much longer, thought Harry. He knew that he could be headed to something worse but he pushed the thought away. Anything is better than this small space for the rest of my life, he thought. “Even death,” he whispered, surprising himself at how comforting the idea sounded.

  As they pulled him outside, a large hand in the center of his back pushing him with a steady strain, he twisted around to get a good look at the house. It had been dark when they arrived and he had felt so beaten by all of his dreams that he didn’t lift his head. He wanted to remember where Norman and Tom had left him to rot.

  The house was a Spanish revival and looked like a cheap version of something that an American dreamed up who liked bling but couldn’t stop himself from cutting corners.

  Just inside the front door would have revealed a different story.

  The two-story was really a fortress designed to quietly keep someone inside. The walls were reinforced and heavily insulated for sound. The windows were level-eight panes of polycarbonate surrounded in glass and could withstand early rounds from even an AK47.

  That was all the Circle guards thought they would need to keep Harry Weiskopf secure. No one was even supposed to know he was still alive, much less his whereabouts. Fewer than ten people knew what had really happened.

  His family held a funeral back in Richmond, Virginia and buried a John Doe from the local morgue. The church was full to overflowing with people who knew Norman and his wife, Wallis. Norman had wept as if Harry was really dead and had said a lot of nice things about the three brothers when they were little. Both he and Tom had even been pallbearers bearing the token brother out of the church on their shoulders. His stand-in was now resting comfortably in Hollywood Cemetery near the soldiers who had died in the War Between the States

  A guard told him all of that but was overheard and quickly replaced. That had been the end of any kind of real news and had hurt Harry the most. It was as if he had never existed and was easily forgotten. “I have no family,” he said, this time with a little more volume. The leader seemed to smile a little but quickly went back to softly barking orders.

  Harry never knew what they listed as the cause of death. He was hoping it was some kind of accident and nothing as boring as heart failure. His brothers had stopped by only once to say goodbye and never made contact again. They blamed him for all of the murders but that wasn’t fair. That’s not what he was trying to do, after all when he told a Management operative about Carol Schaeffer and the thumb drive she had in her possession. It had all gone horribly wrong and they had killed her. Nothing was really right after that and more people had died while everyone fought over that thumb drive. “Like a fumbled football at a championship game,” said Harry, to no one in particular. It didn’t matter, no one was really listening to him anyway.

  He felt his stomach sour and he pressed his eyes shut, hesitating and trying to stop for just a moment.

  “Move it,” hissed the older man. The hand in Harry’s back pushed a little harder. They pushed Harry into the back seat of a large, black SUV with dark, tinted windows. “I thought these were illega
l in Florida,” said Harry, as if that mattered. He could feel a steady stream of fear starting to creep up inside of him.

  Suddenly, clear as day, a memory of Norman, Tom and Harry hanging out with their dad popped up in his head. It was one of those rare Richmond winters where the snowfall was heavy and the ground stayed cold. School closed for a few days and before long their mother was tired of seeing them draped all over the furniture, complaining about nothing to do.

  They had all hiked to the Virginia Country Club with its wide, steep hill that would have made for a perfect ride. But the groundskeeper was watching out for interlopers and had shooed them away, saying it would hurt the golf course grounds.

  Norman was starting to fade and said he was cold but for once, Tom had sided with Harry and insisted they had come too far to turn back. There aren’t going to be many snowfalls like this, Harry had said. He felt a certain surprise of delight when Tom had agreed and told Norman to keep walking.

  They had pressed on to Boatwright Lawn at the nearby University of Richmond and found a lot of their friends already happily throwing themselves down the hill on trays from the cafeteria, or on round plastic sleds and old-fashioned Flexible Flyers. The brothers had a long, plastic toboggan that could fit all three of them on one run if they squeezed together. Their combined weight made the sled tear down a hill and the air rush into Harry’s lungs. He loved being in the middle where he could feel secure between them.

  They had kept at it, trudging back up the hill so many times till his legs burned from the effort and the snow was jammed into his boots. The walk home seemed to take forever and by the time he was by the fire in the family room his fingers and toes were bright red and numb for what seemed like hours. Their clothes were soaked and hung on a makeshift line their mother had strung in their little laundry room.