Chapter 5 #2
He looked at her in surprise, then shrugged. “I don’t think anybody would run from me, just because of my size.” He shook his head, while the others openly laughed.
She shrugged. “I know a lot of people who would.”
“Me too,” Oakley agreed, doubling over.
“Women,” Trent quipped, with a chuckle.
She frowned. “Don’t be sexist,” she chastised him.
“Men would definitely run from him too.” She looked around the room, everyone still laughing, and felt the heat rushing to her face.
“It just struck me that it seems to be an odd size for a man … in your position. Don’t you stick out everywhere?
” she asked Hayden. Then she felt so embarrassed for having asked that out loud.
He laughed. “Believe me that this job has nothing to do with physical size at all,” he explained. “It has everything to do with our abilities.”
She felt at ease, glad that he didn’t seem to mind her blurting it out or getting the ribbing from the others.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely not dissing that.
It’s just the first thought that entered my head when I saw how big you are,” she acknowledged, with a laugh.
She turned back to Rubin and then frowned.
“You’re pretty close in size too, aren’t you? ”
“A couple inches shorter than he is,” he replied, “and so is Trent.”
She nodded. “As long as you guys can do the job, I guess it doesn’t really matter what size you are.” She yawned.
The obvious opportunity for a variety of smart remarks hung in the air, and Rubin eyed his guys, happy to see that they all recognized how insensitive that would be, considering what she’d been through. “Still tired?” Rubin asked her.
She nodded. “It’ll take a while to recuperate. I was hoping I would bounce back faster, but maybe I was expecting too much.”
“That’s understandable, but you are expecting too much. Your body needs whatever time it takes to heal up, and you can’t rush it,” Rubin told her. “Give it time, give it a chance to heal, and you will be all the better for it.”
She nodded. “While we’re here, are we doing anything, or is it just literally lazing around the place, waiting for the next meal—”
“Or the next nap,” Oakley added.
Tricia snorted at that comment. He was probably the most talkative of the bunch of them, besides Rubin, who she believed was probably as reclusive as the rest of them. He was only engaging so she felt safe around them.
Rubin smiled. “For you, napping is exactly what you’re supposed to do. It’ll help divert all your energy to healing.”
“What will you do?” she asked.
“We’ll keep watch, helping the rest of our team sort out who else is involved in this. At the core, it may be about this vote, yet it’s really about making sure that those trying to engineer the result they want through nefarious means are identified and are held accountable for their actions.”
She just nodded.
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” Hayden asked, glancing at her. “I understand that you saw and spent considerable time with the kidnapper that Rubin shot.”
“Yes,” she confirmed and looked back to Rubin and then to Oakley. “And these guys checked him out.”
Hayden nodded. “Right, and we already have a picture of him.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“We haven’t had any luck identifying him. Was there anything that you heard as to a name, part of a name, nickname?”
“I called him Double Chin,” she shared, with a shrug, “only to myself of course. But I heard him called Rick by one of the other kidnappers, which I told Rubin already. Rick used texts mostly.” Then she frowned and asked, “You still have his phone, right?”
He nodded. “And we haven’t been able to trace any of the numbers.”
“We’re still working on it,” Trent announced.
“So, what does that mean?” Tricia asked.
“It means that the kidnappers were using burner phones,” Hayden replied. “And, if one link of the chain were discovered, then the other links would be broken as well. So, even though he was killed, and we have his phone, everybody else involved in this kidnapping is unknown to us … for now.”
She nodded. “Which makes sense. He did get a message. He punched his fist in the air and told me that I would be in trouble now.”
“Any idea what he meant by that?”
“I don’t have a clue what that meant specifically, but I took it to mean nothing good for me.
As far as I can recall, nothing else during the time I was with him indicated who he was, why they did this, or who he was working with.
I was trying hard to keep my ears open—in between being laughed at and humiliated.
” She frowned, glanced down at the table, and added, “In between punishments.”
Tricia didn’t say anything more than that.
Rubin glanced at the other men and then back at her. “So, you have no idea where you were, why you were there in particular, who he was working with, or anything else?”
She winced. “And now you make me feel as if I should have picked up some super spy secrets while I was in there. Like some Mata Hari.” Her heart suddenly raced, almost as if a panic attack were coming.
“Take a breath,” Rubin suggested, his tone calm and his voice smooth.
It took her a minute or two to get her breathing even.
When she finally could, she went on. “Honest to God, I have no idea who he was or who he worked for.” She stared off in the distance, and her gaze flipped back to him.
“Look. You have asked me these same questions again and again. I get it. You need info, but he was a pig. He wasn’t exactly the guy a gal could ever take home to mom.
He was rough, angry, and violent, bloodthirsty even.
But the only thing he seemed to care about in all of this was money.
I didn’t see that he was motivated by anything else. ”
“Why money?”
“He was too much of a pig to have cared about patriotism or any cause along that line. That’s my opinion obviously, but that’s what I was left with.
I have no idea what motivated him, and I’m just guessing here.
I don’t really know. He had no physical contact with anybody while I was there—only the one guy who joined him while he transported me to the train station, and that guy left right afterward. ”
“And before that?”
“Other masked people were at the university in London, where I was doing a semester-abroad program. Another guy was at the, um …” She stared off for a moment, shaking her head. “God, some of this was … rough and I—”
“That’s okay,” Rubin interjected. “Just take your time and tell us what you remember, and we’ll go from there.”
After a moment to collect her thoughts, she continued.
“I, I don’t remember how many masked people were at the school.
I don’t know if I ever knew. Three of us were taken.
So, at least three men were involved in the actual kidnapping, though it seemed like more.
We were so overwhelmed that we had no option to run or to fight.
The other two women, … Sam and Shirley, were in one of my classes, but we weren’t friends.
Shirley thought I was the reason for the kidnapping and was quick to throw me under the bus. ”
“So, she tried to bargain?”
She nodded. “Unfortunately, all it did was get them both some terrible beatings.”
“Who were they?” Hayden asked.
“I already told—”
“Yes, but who were they? What were they like? Family, business, all that good stuff.”
“Shirley’s mother was a socialite from Paris, and Sam?
… I believe her father was some big shot businessman with some Venezuelan connection or something.
I don’t really know. I may have her confused with someone else.
As I said, I don’t know them. As far as I know, the three of us were the only exchange students who came from different countries for the semester. ”
“So much for friends,” he muttered.
“They weren’t my … friends,” she repeated, dropping her gaze. “They were people who went to the same university exchange program as I did. Looking back, I don’t really know much about anyone going to classes with me. My matriculation was at a private university in New York.”
“Okay.” Rubin shrugged. “So, do you think Shirley and Sam just got caught up in it by accident?”
“I’m assuming so. I have no reason to believe otherwise, but that’s the thing. It happened so fast that I assumed we were just caught up together. We left the building …” She stopped, shaking her head. “We had finished an evening concert and were heading back to our rooms.”
She remembered the horror of turning a corner, only to find the masked men standing there, with the dean beaten and bloodied on the ground.
“They were not smooth and subtle about their approach,” Rubin noted, “so this is good to know. Keep going, and don’t leave anything out.”
“No, not subtle at all,” she stated sarcastically. “It was much more like shoot first and ask questions later,” she stated. “Did the, did the dean survive the assault?” She turned to Rubin. “Please tell me that he did.”
“It’s possible. We haven’t heard an update on that because it’s not relevant to our mission,” he replied.
“Could you get one?” she asked.
Surprised, he nodded. “I’ll try.”
“Thanks.” She had to be satisfied with that. “He was a good man,” she shared, “and I don’t want to be thinking about him in a past tense.”
“I haven’t got an update on Sam either,” he acknowledged.
For the benefit of the newcomers as well, he explained, “We found Sam at the target warehouse, and she was pretty banged up, with broken bones and the whole bit. Don’t know about internal injuries.
Last I heard, she was holding her own, but that was early on. I’ll ask Mason for an update.”
She held back the fear that others had been injured as well. “It happened so fast, and it was very physical. I came around a corner, and they were right there. We were dropped on the spot. There was no real opportunity for resistance because we didn’t get any warning. It was just so fast.”