Ransom X

by a b

  Wagner looked over and saw that Legacy had a chart of important moments for each Blue, Brown, Green, Yellow and Purple – Legacy had put that moment in the Purple column. She asked, “How did you know that Blue was talking directly to Purple?”

  A frown creased Legacy’s even brow, “I always know who he’s talking to. In fact you could read any line off this transcript and I could tell you the speaker.”

  Wagner picked a paper out of the stack and read. “How does that feel?”

  “Full sentence please – “ Legacy demanded.

  “What?”

  “If it’s “how does that feel, cunt?” it’s Purple, if it’s “How does that feel, bitch?” it’s Yellow. Brown says “Howsabout that baby?” Green never talks to her directly, he’ll say, “Do you think she’s had enough” or “I think she’s done.” Blue doesn’t ask questions, he gives orders.” Legacy was distracted, already moving on to the next moment in the video.

  “Give me the time numbers on the side of the transcript and I’ll pull the moments that you highlighted up. Afterward I can give them twenty second handles and compile a DVD reel of all of them.”

  If he was impressed, he’d decided not to exhibit it. Legacy rolled a pearl of wisdom around the tip of his tongue. “New ways aren’t always better.”

  “Just this time.”

  Almost an hour without a word passing between the pair, articulated by the tapping of keys on a keyboard and the occasional screech of the computer speaker as it cut into the audio of the digital video momentarily and gave a split second snapshot of what was going on in the session. Groans, screams, and foul language were the usual accompaniment – the soundtrack played like a haunted house, with all of the edges rounded off and all the sharp objects blunted by the distant nature of the evil. It barely seemed real. Legacy had to remind himself that these images were being broadcast through the air on wifi and satellite Internet connections all the time. They surrounded and penetrated walls and buildings into the most civilized recesses of everywhere.

  Legacy filled up his time while Wagner was compiling the disc, tracing a thousand obscure connections on the walls, eyes darting between pictures and reports, transcripts and diagrams. He knew he could step into the settings of any of the abductions and feel the grass or gravel beneath his feet. Legacy prepared himself to lay in wait at each location – and ready himself for the next abduction.

  He only noticed that Wagner was done when she stood directly in his line of sight holding up a disc. “Make a fresh pot of coffee and I’ll show you what I’ve been up to.”

  It was one of the few appliances in the kitchen Legacy knew how to use.

  The pronouncement no almond milk for creamer was met with a face that made the statement equivalent to lets eat household pets for dinner. Legacy couldn’t believe the topics that lead Wagner to unfiltered displays of emotion. He’d seen joy and disappointment, but never did he expect that a lack of pressed nut creamer would bother her.

  There was a moment where she teetered on the edge of going to the local convenience store, but in the end it was agreed that using cream for creamer wasn’t the most unnatural of purposes. She was in a hurry to show Legacy the compilation of video. In the dead of night with a coffee pot spitting out steamy gasps of water into the basket, Wagner flipped her notebook open on the counter.

  Legacy watched the first few clips like a conductor watching the trains come in and out of the station. No surprises, it was clockwork, but he had to be there to confirm a previously formed schedule of expectation. Green never showed on camera on Mondays, Purple liked to mark Laura so that his smell would stay on her during the shoot. He’d wipe the sweat under his arms above her top lip or spit some of his sticky tobacco brown spittle onto a lock of her hair then curl it down around her cheek.

  Yellow and Brown got the dirty work, the kinds of things that professionals get paid extra for. They did them on command, trained dogs, and never initiated anything without Blue telling them. Green was always the first out of the room and the only one of them who routinely seemed to set his own schedule. He would walk out and in without a word from Blue. Knowing the temperament of Blue, Legacy was sure, after watching the tape, that Green had some kind of essential job outside of the shoot. The girls’ faces changed with each cut, but the behavior of the men seldom changed at all.

  “When did that line start coming up?” Legacy pointed to a message that scrolled across the bottom of the video. “Any disruption of this video web cast by federal authorities will result in the termination of the subject.” It was on some of the clips and not on others.

  “Brit was in the crosshairs when this became a federal investigation. And the minute our people yanked on the wires of the Internet distributors and put out feelers on where the money went – this message popped up.” Wagner responded.

  “Blue put it up.” Legacy watched another clip where the image was framed slightly low. “He leaves room in his frame for the message. That’s no accident. He controls every aspect of the images we see.”

  Wagner watched as three more examples of Blue’s camera work flashed across the screen, each keeping the content high in the frame.

  “Push him and he responds with a threat.” Wagner said.

  “Speaking of responses. Where is that section that I put a star by in my notes, that's the section I need another set of eyes. It’s what I wanted you to look at the other day.”

  Wagner said, “It’s about an hour away.”

  Legacy replied “Fast forward.”

  Wagner hit him with a quaint smile, fast forward. How does one fast-forward a disc with digital information with pickup lasers ready to scan any sector? The chiding look reminded Legacy of why he so needed a female perspective on the next clip. There were some things that Legacy could not process, and although he knew the clip was significant, he didn’t know exactly why the alarms had gone off in his head.

  “There.” Legacy said seeing the image materialize on the screen at a touch of a button. “That’s it.”

  A thin trickle of blood cut a path down Laura’s bound wrists making a line or crimson that would soon soak into the raven slope of her hair. She spoke, “You don’t get to control everything. See it in my eyes.” The words repeated in his mind. It was a flash of desperation, set jaw, nothing about the delivery of words could be found at any other time in the transcript. They were the words of a girl pushed to her limits – Legacy recognized those limits, having come up against his own and having pushed others into facing their own on so many occasions in the past. This was a raw tap into Laura and what she was saying had a frantic importance.

  “I know Laura, and that’s not her.” Legacy looked up and saw shock on Wagner’s face.

  Wagner said, “She’s terrified.”

  “Look past that, she has a purpose. Terrified people want to give up, she wants something else, something about her eyes, line of sight, something she’s seen or wants us to see.” Legacy responded.

  “The lines around her eyes, are drawn by her, they line the inner eyelids. The curves match the curves on the fertility lines that she paints on her body.” The eyeliner marks indeed bulged and curved creating a striking pattern, like the eye was in full blossom.

  “Your experts say that she draws these lines to exert control over her body, but the patterns – “ Legacy couldn’t quite grasp the meaning.

  “The runes are gibberish, we’ve had teams of people looking for any hidden meanings and they’ve found nothing.”

  “She wants you to look at her eyes.” Legacy and Wagner turned toward the voice. Chess stood in the dark hallway.

  “Chess? Glad to have you eavesdropping, come in.” His voice was so calm he couldn’t possibly be furious underneath.

  “I’d rather stay here.” She replied.

  “Dear, you shouldn’t be seeing this.” Wagner said.

  Chess stepped out of a long shadow onto the linoleum of the kitchen. Her face glowed in the yellow light and her eyes sparkled.
She had something in her mind that she knew would make her father happy, and all of the grotesque circumstances melted away under her bare feet as she walked to the computer.

  “Find a frame where she blinks.” She watched Wagner advance the video until her eyes were closed motionless.

  Legacy and Wagner stared at the screen. A wave of energy crashed outward as they saw the message in a bottle that Laura had been so careful to guard from her captors and yet so desperate to have others find. Etched in dark lines on her eyelids were two perfect symbols slightly out of character of the older glyphs that decorated her body. Legacy recognized them immediately.

  “It’s Mandarin.”

  “Hea Wah” Chess sounded out the words.

  “What does it mean?” Wagner asked eyes wide.

  “Nothing.” Legacy said.

  But Laura obviously had something to say and now they were listening. Wagner threw her arms around Legacy’s neck hauling her off of the ground.

  She rocked back onto her feet and Legacy’s hands gripped her tight by the shoulders and he looked like he wanted to say something to the young agent at four in the morning, but then came another input from the room.

  Chess smiled, “I’ll go.” Legacy turned. He had almost forgotten how much he wanted to kill his daughter. The smile didn’t help; she’d used that smile to get away with murder from age six to ten. He knew if she was going that far back, she must know she was in a childish kind of trouble.

  He whirled on her and looking down the bump on his nose expressionless and her smile crashed upon those rocks. She turned and walked out of the room allowing herself a skip as she turned the corner onto the shag carpet.

  It was a move that Legacy was not intended to see. The irregular footsteps let him know that she was proud of herself no matter how angry he was.

  It was an act of rebellion that only a father and daughter with a very complicated playbook could have called. The room Chess left came alive with activity in her absence.

  Wagner was on her feet, “We should turn this over to IT to isolate the blink frames.”

  Legacy responded, “That’ll take too long, I know someone who’ll have it done overnight.”

  Wagner was incredulous, “But we need to report this up the chain, this could be a major break in the case –”

  “Let’s find out.” Legacy pulled out his cell phone.

  “Who is up at three AM?”

  Tyke was always up at three AM; in fact he called the time between three and five in the morning prime time. It was his time to be at one with himself with no interruptions. Tonight, prime time was preempted by Legacy time.

  “This should be easy for you.” Legacy said into the phone.

  “That’s not fair Legacy.” Tyke snorted in disgust. “You know that everything is easy for me.”

  “Then stop being so versatile, I’ve got another call coming in.”

  “At three a –”

  Legacy set down the phone, allowing himself a moment to enjoy Tyke’s indignation. There was something satisfying and amusing about chipping away at someone who thought he had no weaknesses.

  Legacy excused himself then went down the hallway to Chess’ bedroom to unruin her life.

  “What you saw on that screen was ugly, and I don’t want anything ugly like that to touch you, do you understand?” Legacy started, looking directly into Chess’ eyes. The hall light flooded the dark room and father paced in front of daughter, creating a slow strobe pattern of light on her face.

  “It was indeed the first time I’ve seen anything like that, so it did make a lasting impression.” Chess countered.

  Legacy’s chest caved in with defeat, it was like the air inside him turned solid, but every method of exhaust would just pollute the air between him and his daughter further. He sighed instead of speaking.

  “I’m just kidding dad. There was a porno on Veronica’s big screen half the night last sleep over.”

  “Which one is Veronica?” his inflection rose, Legacy couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “The one you love. It’s all over - “

  “At your age?” Chess took her father’s hand and pressed it to her shoulder, he stood leaning delicately on her, testing reality like a grounding rod after a lightning strike.

  “Did I help you with your case?” Her eyes shone pure and true.

  Legacy answered, “Yes, and could you make me one promise? One that you also promise not to break.”

  A smile lit her youthful face, it was the kind of expression that Legacy was beginning to miss, even before it went away, “Anything, dad.”

  Legacy found their normal banter waiting for him as he crossed his hand over her forehead. “Conform your life to the image that I have of you inside my head until you’re at least twenty one.”

  “If you can morph that image so that I have a tiny tattoo on my shoulder.” Chess teased.

  Legacy strode toward the door and spoke into the open hallway, “Twenty-one it is then.”

  Chapter 40 Dog Tags

  “Between dust and dreams there is life.”

  It was a phrase barked at all the recruits day and night.

  The saying was coined by the man who trained Legacy at Special Forces. He was a big man with loose vocal chords that could dig deep into baritone to find just the pitch that made his words resonate filling the chest of every man in the proximity of his voice.

  Legacy loved the phrase, partly because he had no idea what it meant. He remembered that it was used to motivate, the idea being that before a man returned to the earth he had to work to make his imprint or his life would be no different than a dream. But Legacy thought the words more closely stated in fact that life could be bent toward either the pursuit of death, dust, or alignment with the ideal, dreams. In Legacy’s reading, every step away from the ideal was one closer to death. It was the kind of saying that kept a man’s engine running.

  Legacy made it clear from the day he showed up at age seventeen that he would not just get through his elite training, he would dominate it in every phase. There was a Special Forces test – the first week of training everyone ran one mile a day. The second week the run went up to two miles twice a day. By week five, the men were expected to complete a full training regimen during the day, while running five miles five times a day. This was a marathon of will. It continued until half of the men who started the training dropped out. This occurred on the second day of the fifth week.

  Legacy didn’t stop; it wasn’t good enough to be in the top fifty percent. He continued running, five times a day, five miles. Others in his unit started joining him, once or twice a day. This lasted until the third day of the seventh week, when Legacy did back-to-back seven-mile jogs, returning at three AM to find his training officer, Perkins, waiting for him at the barracks door.

  Legacy would never forget the words he imparted on that dewy hot night. He said, “I went through this ten years ago, and I didn’t want to quit either. I ran the course until my lungs were ready to explode. I quit on the second day of the seventh week.” He paused to let Legacy appreciate the math, “so get your ass to nine hours of sleep and miss morning call. Oh and if I see you on the trail again, I’ll shoot you.”

  Legacy scraped down the carpet to the study. His limits had been tested so often, two nights in a row without sleep was like a holiday. When he saw Wagner slumped over her computer, deliberating over each image and recording the Kanji characters in her notebook – glasses perched on the slim bridge of her nose, eyes marbled with red streaks like a good cut of meat. He gave up a little ground to encourage his fellow agent.

  “We’ll call a meeting in the morning, we shouldn’t get to have all the fun. You need some sleep.” He observed.

  Wagner stretched and let a drowsy look of contentment slip over her face. She pulled both arms out of the sleeves of her jacket leaving it over the chair and her standing in white dress shirt.

  Legacy continued, “We’ll need a qualified linguist to go over all
of the findings.”

  “So?” Wagner purred in a husky tired voice.

  Legacy watched her step out of her heels and sink an inch on his horizon line. She was still shoulder height and strangely provocative holding a shoe in one hand and pulling a clip from her hair with the other. Legacy stared at the attractive pose standing in front of him with one emotion flooding his thoughts: fear.

  “So where’s the guest room?” Wagner asked passing by him on the way to the bathroom. “I won’t make it back to my hotel in time for an hour before morning.”

  “Miss morning call.” Legacy said.