28. Caleph
28
CALEPH
E verything hurts. Every fucking bone in my body feels like it’s on fire. Someone hauls me out of the car just as it bursts into flames and threatens to swallow the city whole. My eyes adjust to the carnage around me as my body heaves, every muscle aching. My gaze swings across the road, and I watch in horror as Ariadne is hauled into a van and driven off, helpless to do anything but watch it happen.
A murderous energy surges through me. I may be hurt, but my heart is working just fine, and I feel her absence as though someone has driven a knife through my heart. I can hear the ambulance in the distance, and I know I need to get up and out of here now, otherwise there’ll be too many questions, which will just delay me finding Ariadne. I will burn this city down trying to find her knowing that if one strand of her hair is harmed, I will roast those bastards over a spit fire then feed them to my dogs.
I fumble in my pocket for my phone, bring it out to find the screen has shattered. It’s still usable, but I can barely hold it between my fingers for all the pain I feel, while a bystander is telling me to stay calm; that help is on the way.
I finally manage to unlock the phone. I open it and send an SOS to the dedicated number I have for such situations. The SMS is sent to one number, which then on sends to my emergency contacts list with my coordinates. The beauty of having so much money is that I have people everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean I could even have people on Mars if I needed them there.
And sure enough, it’s only a few minutes before a car skids to a halt beside me. The doors fling open, and two men rush out, lift me off the sidewalk and bundle me into the car before skidding off again. We’re weaving through traffic until they stop at a little house where I know one of our doctors resides. They must have called ahead, because he’s at the door even before they’ve come around to grab me and carry me into his home where he has a makeshift medical room.
He patches me up and inserts a needle into my arm to prohibit infections. Drowsiness washes over me and I fight it with everything in me as I try to get up and do the impossible. I have to find Ariadne. But I’m too far gone, and my body shuts down seconds before I go folding to the ground.
* * *
When I come to, a giant of a man has his back turned to me as he discusses something with the doctor in the corner of the room. Attila.
My torso is bandaged, the cloth well tied around my body. I can feel the tiny pinpricks of pain in my face where I was slashed and decimated after the car accident. Everything aches; there’s no doubt in my mind that the accident was no accident. I will make it my life's mission to find out who intercepted the car meaning to do us harm, and hell hath no fury like a man on the war path.
It takes me a moment to collect my bearings, but when I do, the sheet around me rustles noisily as I try to get up. He turns, looks at me, and the bastard rolls his eyes as I try to bite down the pain cutting through me. It’s embedded in every single bone in my body.
“About fucking time,” he mutters, coming to stand beside the bed.
“Get me my clothes,” I bite out.
“Whoa, buddy. You’re not going anywhere. You’re seriously hurt and you need to rest.”
“They’ve got Ariadne.”
Attila unsuccessfully tries to hide his surprise that she’s the first person I would worry about when I regained consciousness.
“I’ve got people working on that,” he tells me.
“So what are you doing here?” I ask him. “I want every man out looking for her.”
“Relax, Caleph. I’m handling it.”
“How? How are you handling it?!”
My voice is louder than I intended, but I don’t stop long enough to regret it. They took Ariadne and we have no idea where the fuck they’ve taken her or what they’re doing to her while we waste precious minutes here instead of being out there looking for her.
Attila looks at me as though seeing me for the first time, his mouth pressed into a hard line as he analyses me. Like he has so much to say but doesn't quite know how to say it. My body is numb with pain. My mind is racked with fear, and my soul is engulfed with rage. I am so angry I could kill someone. I could tear them apart with my bare hands, chew them up with my bare teeth then spit them back out again.
Attila smirks and finally relents when I insist on getting up. “Who knew all it would take is a woman to bring out the beast in you again.”
* * *
“The good thing is they want her alive,” Attila says, as we climb into the car.
We drive a short distance until we enter the city. Attila drives into a building basement and emerges on the other side before he drives two blocks and enters another basement. Security measure: if anyone was tailing and waiting for us to emerge from the first building, they’d be waiting a very long time.
Someone obviously knew that Ariadne was in Guatemala, and moreover, they knew she was with me. I wondered who knew and at which point they realized it. Definitely someone who was intimate with my day-to-day operations and somehow knew where to find us.
“They’ll either try to move her out of the country or someone will be coming here to collect her.”
“Ports? Airports?” I wince as a shard of pain lances through me. It hurts to even breathe.
“We have them all covered.”
Attila shoots me a reassuring look, his eyes lingering on me longer than usual, before he tells me that we’ll find her. We’ve lost about six hours while I was up to my eyeballs on painkillers, trying to bite back the stabbing pain that ebbed and flowed through my broken body.
“Camera footage?”
“Waiting for us in the safehouse.”
It isn’t safe for us to go back to the house. I immediately feel the void of Ariadne’s absence from the forest. Instead, I’ll be staying in this sterile apartment that is fitted out like an industrial warehouse and harbors an impressive cache of weapons.
There are a dozen or more of our men scattered around the apartment, standing to attention as we step out of the elevator. Most have worked for us for years and I know them on a first name basis. Their loyalty is undisputed.
Attila hurries to the kitchen bench and takes control of a laptop, turning it around so the screen sits between us. Our tech man on the ground in Guatemala comes to stand beside us. He taps out a series of numbers on the keyboard until the screen comes to life and the scene of our accident starts to play out.
I watch on in silence as the film moves in slow motion, paying careful attention when the van cuts through traffic and skids across the road to smash into the side of the four-wheel drive. And then, as onlookers stop and watch in horror, a man of immense proportions gets out of the van and limps across the pavement until he stops at the car. Without pause, his arms reach into the car and pull out a very badly injured Ariadne, dragging her across the road to his van. And the last thing I see is the horrified look on Ariadne’s face as she looks back at the four-wheel drive as it hisses with its impending fire, and she is hurled into the back of the vehicle and driven away.