Chapter 12 #2
“Good. Remember that gun. Now listen carefully. This is what I want you to do.” The voice was back to cool and calm.
Giving instructions as if indicating which way to Balboa Park.
“Call a car, tell him to take you to Fleetridge, to the Westwood shopping mall parking lot there. Keep this line open and the video function on so I can hear and see what you’re doing, otherwise your father will pay the consequences.
If you don’t come alone, your father’s dead meat.
He’s dead meat, anyway, anyone can see that, but I’ll make him suffer before he goes.
If you don’t do exactly as I say, I’ll disappear with him and you’ll never see him again, but you’ll know that every second of what’s left of his life I’ll be hurting him. Is that clear?”
The temperature in the room had suddenly dropped. Nicole was shivering with terror and cold. “C-clear,” she whispered.
“If you call anyone, if you signal anyone, if you don’t come alone, your father will pay first, then you.
At the parking lot there will be someone to meet you.
Is that clear? Deviate one inch from this and your father gets a bullet in the knee, first thing.
I don’t have to tell you how excruciatingly painful that would be. ”
“No, no!” Panic exploded in her head. “Don’t do that! Oh God, please! Don’t worry, I’ll follow your instructions to the letter.”
“Of course you will.” That horrible voice, now sounding genial and chirpy. “Oh, and pray that you find a car right away, because I’m giving you twenty minutes to get to the meeting point, after which I start shooting bits of your father off.”
“N-no.” Her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely get the words out. “D-don’t. P-please.”
“Then bring me what I want.”
Oh God. What was it? “I don’t know what you want!”
But she was talking to dead air. He hadn’t hung up, though. He was keeping the connection open.
So terrified her hands wouldn’t work properly, Nicole tried to pick up Sam’s cordless handset, fumbled it badly and watched as it bounced on the floor.
It took her two tries before she could punch in the taxi service’s number.
While waiting for the call to go through, she fumbled her shirt on and pulled her jeans up, sliding her feet into loafers, picking up her purse.
The instant she heard the dispatcher tell her that a car would be arriving in four minutes at the front gate, she rushed out to the bank of elevators, punching the button over and over again in her anxiety.
Her skin prickled with panic as she got into the elevator and punched for the ground floor.
The damned thing was so slow! When, after a million years, it finally reached the ground floor, she shot out and ran across the lobby and into the landscaped front garden, checking anxiously along the dark road for a car with a taxi sign on top, trembling with anxiety.
It was 2 A.M. and the residential area was quiet, the vast darkness of the ocean across the road silent and oppressive.
She was holding her cell phone in her hand, gazing at it longingly.
Sam. Sam was at the other end. All she had to do was close this connection and call him.
He’d come running. Oh God, Sam. For just a moment she yearned with all her heart to be able to listen to that deep, reassuring voice.
Sam would know what to do, would know how to help her father.
But that cold implacable voice had been very specific. Don’t make any calls. Keep the line open or your father will pay.
She couldn’t risk it. She’d give anything in her power to communicate with Sam, but not if her father was going to pay the price.
A small voice somewhere inside her said that her father was going to pay a horrific price, anyway.
And so would she. But she had to play this according to the rules set down by that sadistic bastard.
The man had been willing to casually slice her father’s face open just to make a point. If he felt that she wasn’t obeying his orders…
It didn’t bear thinking about.
She hopped up and down, chilled to the bone in the dark night, checking the time feverishly, obsessively. Twenty minutes. He’d said she had twenty minutes to get to the mall parking lot and five had already gone by. Another couple of minutes and they couldn’t possibly make it in time.
Ah! Bright headlights and a taxi sign on the roof, traveling fast on the empty road. Inside a minute she could see the taxi sign clearly and heaved a sigh of relief as the yellow cab pulled to the curb. She rushed out, wrenching the cab door open.
“I’ll pay you double if you can get me to the Westwood shopping mall parking lot in Fleetridge inside of fifteen minutes.” Her voice was high, hysterical.
The driver looked like a student, clean-cut and very young, a bit astonished at the wild woman flinging herself into the backseat.
“You got it,” he grunted, taking off so fast the tires squealed against the asphalt.
She stared out the window at the black ocean disappearing from sight as the driver turned inland, making good time on the empty streets.
Sam, she thought again. She wanted to hear his voice with a ferocity that astonished her. A tear rolled down her cheek and she brushed it away impatiently. Tears wouldn’t help. Nothing could help.
She shuddered as she thought of her father in that man’s hands.
Her dad was barely kept alive with all the love and care in the world, and all the tricks the medical profession could pull out of its bag.
Being held against his will by a violent man capable of hurting him…
it could kill him. She might be speeding toward a place where she would only find her father’s corpse and a violent thug willing to harm a helpless old man.
A thug who wanted something from her, though she had no idea what.
She imagined he wanted her computer files, even though there was nothing in her hard disk that could possibly be of any use to anyone besides her and her clients.
When the man discovered this, discovered that she didn’t have what he wanted, whatever it was, he’d kill her.
She was speeding toward her father’s possible death and her own certain one.
The young cab driver reached the parking lot and entered with a dramatic turn, slewing slightly on the gravel of the soft shoulder.
The lot was empty except for a dirty off-white van, a man standing outside the driver’s door.
The lot was illuminated with streetlamps except for the one directly above the van, so she couldn’t make out the man’s face.
“There you go,” the driver said cheerfully, stopping the meter. It read $30. “Fifteen minutes on the dot.”
Nicole didn’t trust her voice. She simply threw a fifty and a ten at him and climbed out of the car on rubber legs.
Nicole crossed the parking lot slowly, her legs barely holding her up. By the time she reached the man standing by the van, he had his hand out.
It wasn’t the intruder. There were at least two men involved in this, then.
Deep down, there had been a faint hope that somehow she could outwit the intruder, even if she couldn’t outfight him.
She wasn’t going to be taken by surprise.
Maybe she could whack him over the head with something while he wasn’t looking or…
her imagination stopped there. But it wasn’t going to happen.
There were two men involved and she wasn’t going to come out of this alive.
“Phone.” This man’s voice was just as calm, just as cold as the other man’s. Cut out of the same mold. Alert, icy and deadly.
Her hand shook as she held the cell out to him.
The man gave a short jerk of his head. “Get in.”
Never get into the car.
One of the cardinal rules for State Department families in countries where kidnapping was a major industry. Never get into the car. Make a run for it. Attract attention by screaming. Carry Mace and use it. But never, ever get into the car. If you got into the car, you were as good as dead.
Wonderful advice. Only one thing. The clever men and women running the State Department Security Force seminars never told their listeners what to do when a loved one was being held hostage.
Never get into the car.
She got into the car.
The man threw her cell phone on the ground, crushed it with his boot heel, kicked it into the scrub off the lot and got behind the wheel.
Never get into the car.
Nicole was in the car and her last hope of reaching Sam was lying in shards on the dark asphalt.