We Can See You

by Simon Kernick

  The turn-off to Garland appeared ahead, and Brook headed down the track that led to the parking lot. The lot itself was next to a thick line of trees which marked the park entrance, and was hidden from the main road by a high, grassy bank on the other side. The park shut at sunset so the place was completely empty.

  Logan looked around again to see if the car had followed them in, knowing that if it did, they’d be blocked in, since there was no other way out.

  But it kept going. They were alone.

  Brook left the engine idling as she looked out the window into the wall of trees. Behind them, the narrow and very shallow Carmel River flowed through the valley towards the sea, ten miles distant. There were plenty of paddling and swimming spots along the river’s banks, making it a popular picnic spot in summer. They’d brought Paige here more than once, to play in the water and enjoy the peaceful surroundings, and Logan had fond memories of being here that were about to be erased for ever. As long as he lived, he would never come back to this place. In fact if he somehow wriggled his way out of this situation and got Paige back, then the two of them – no one else – would definitely leave California and start again, somewhere a long way away, just as he’d always been planning.

  He looked at his watch again: 10.31. He picked up the phone, holding it tightly in his hand, unsure whether he wanted it to ring so they could get this over with, or whether he’d prefer to continue to keep the unknown at arm’s length for a little while longer. He’d never been so scared in his whole goddamned life as he was now. He wished he could talk to Brook about it. Jesus, he wished Anna was there to comfort him and tell him it was all going to be all right. Anna had always known what to say to calm a situation – even when it was her own imminent death. Or even his mom, who’d always had a backbone of steel beneath the smiles and would have told him immediately what he had to do to save his daughter. He missed his mom. They’d been close. But she’d divorced his dad ten years ago and now lived with her female partner in San Diego, and he hadn’t seen her since he couldn’t remember when.

  There was no one to help him. The nearly-man was going to have to do this on his own.

  ‘I wonder if they’re watching us right now?’ said Brook, breaking the tension. ‘Where are you, you bastards? Show yourselves.’

  But there was only silence.

  10.32. 10.33. A bead of sweat ran down Logan’s forehead and he wiped it away angrily. 10.40. How long are they going to torture us? he thought.

  And then the cellphone rang, the ringtone loud and taunting in the car.

  ‘There’s been a change of plan,’ said the kidnapper.

  11

  Brook waved at Logan to get his attention, knowing she had to take control.

  ‘Proof of life,’ she hissed at him.

  He nodded, then leaned away from her, talking into the phone. ‘Paige is going to be there, isn’t she?’ he said, the uncertainty in his voice angering her. He had to be more assertive, otherwise there was no way they’d take him seriously. Showing confidence when you go into a negotiation – even if you don’t feel it – is 70 per cent of the battle. It feeds doubt into the other side otherwise. Right now, Logan was sounding like a pushover, and neither she nor Paige could afford that.

  She moved closer, trying to hear what was being said by the man on the other end of the phone but Logan moved away, leaning his head against the passenger window, making it all but impossible, although she could just make out that it was a man’s voice. ‘What are you doing?’ she mouthed at him. ‘I need to hear.’

  He shook his head at her, then said, ‘I understand’ into the phone, before finishing the call.

  ‘Why are you trying to hide what’s being said from me?’ Brook demanded, suddenly suspicious of her husband again. He looked like a condemned man, pale and drawn, a glistening sheen of sweat on his forehead, in no state to bring his daughter back safely, if that was even what he wanted to do.

  ‘I was trying to hear what he was saying,’ he answered breathlessly. ‘I needed to concentrate.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘We need to get to the intersection with Tassajara Road. We’ll get further instructions then.’

  ‘Why are they messing us around like this?’

  ‘I guess they want to make sure we’re coming on our own, and that the police aren’t involved.’

  Brook stared out into the night. If there was someone watching them now it would mean there’d only been one person waiting for them at the rendezvous, unless there were more than two conspirators, and she didn’t believe that. More than two of them would be too risky. Plus the cut of money per person wouldn’t be enough to outweigh the risk, even if this whole thing was personal rather than financial. And there was no point directing them to different places just to make sure the police weren’t nearby. All the police would have needed to do was place a tracker on the 4runner and they could have followed them anywhere from a distance, and she couldn’t believe the kidnappers didn’t realize this. So why keep up this whole charade? It didn’t make sense. None of it did.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Logan, interrupting her thoughts. ‘They’re calling again with further instructions in ten minutes.’

  Brook reversed, did a rapid turn and drove back out of the picnic area and onto the empty road. ‘Put the phone on speaker,’ she said as they drove. ‘I want to hear their instructions when they next call.’

  Logan looked petrified at this. ‘That’s not a good idea. They might find out you’re listening in.’

  ‘So what? I’m Brook’s mother. I’m a big part of all this. And it’s my money we’re paying them with.’

  ‘Our money,’ he snapped back. ‘We’re married, remember?’

  She took a long, slow breath as she drove through the quiet town of Carmel Valley and into the silent, sparsely populated countryside beyond, knowing that arguing would do neither of them any good. ‘We can’t fight like this, Logan. We’ve got to work together. That’s the only way we’re going to get Paige back.’

  ‘Then let me handle this, Brook. I’m not going to do anything that puts her at risk. Let’s just do what they say. They want to talk to me – and me only – okay?’

  ‘But why? It’s not like I’m not involved.’ She could feel her anger building again and forced it back down. And yet it was true. There was no good reason for Logan not to put the cellphone on speaker.

  Not unless he was hiding something.

  For the next twenty minutes she drove in silence through the narrow, winding valley, the night around them black and silent, the traffic almost non-existent. This road, she knew, meandered along for many miles, getting slowly worse, before it finally hit Highway 101, somewhere a long way south. It scared her to be moving this far from people. Out here, anything could happen.

  As they approached the intersection with Tassajara Road they’d been told to drive to, the kidnappers’ cell rang again. Now Brook was certain they’d put a tracker on her car.

  Logan picked up, without putting it on speaker. ‘Yes, yes,’ he kept saying into the phone, then to Brook: ‘Turn right.’

  She did as she was told, continuing down an unlit road, with a vineyard to their left and a steep hill rising to their right. Logan remained on the phone, telling her to turn left as they came to another junction. They were now in woodland, and the road had become narrow and rutted.

  ‘There’s an old plant nursery up here on the left,’ Logan told her. ‘We need to park up outside and go in on foot.’

  Brook knew the place he was talking about. She’d bought some mature grape vines from there when they’d first moved into the house, and she remembered thinking at the time that it was a strange place to locate a business, in the middle of nowhere and a long way from any customers. She’d read somewhere that there’d been a fire at the nursery a few months ago and that it had since closed. She didn’t like this. She didn’t like it at all.

  A few seconds later, the track that led down to the entrance app
eared in the headlights and Brook turned onto it and drove to the padlocked gates at the entrance.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Logan into the phone and ended the call.

  A narrow track ran into the trees to one side of the gates and Brook pulled the car in there, stopping underneath a tree with a pile of old hoardings stacked against it. There were no other cars visible, but then of course, that was to be expected. The kidnappers were relying on an element of surprise..

  ‘The gates are locked,’ said Brook, cutting the engine. ‘So where are we meant to go now?’

  ‘There’s a hole in the fence just down this track. We get into the plant nursery that way.’ He started to get out of the car.

  She grabbed his arm, stopping him. ‘Then what?’

  ‘We walk down to the other end of the nursery and we’ll get another call then. Let go of my arm. We’ve got to go.’

  Brook made a decision. ‘I want the phone.’

  He frowned. ‘What? No way. I told you—’

  ‘I know what you’ve told me. But I need to be the one who negotiates with these people, whoever they are. We’ve given them too much of an easy ride so far.’

  ‘Look, for Christ’s sakes. Don’t screw this up.’

  ‘I’m not. I just want to make sure we see Paige before we part with the money. And I’m sorry, Logan, but I don’t trust you to do that.’

  ‘I don’t care what you think,’ he said, pulling away from her grip and opening the car door. ‘This is how it’s going to happen.’

  ‘Give me their phone or I drive away with the money.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ he said. ‘I’m taking the money.’

  ‘Fine. Take the money. But I’ll leave here and call the police.’

  He stared at her in disbelief. ‘You wouldn’t? Jesus, Brook. What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going with my gut, Logan. I’m the best person to negotiate with them.’

  ‘That’s you all over. You’re a fucking control freak.’

  ‘It’s your choice,’ she said. ‘Make it now.’

  He continued looking at her for a couple of seconds longer, clearly trying to work out whether or not she was serious, before deciding she was. With an expression of sheer disgust, he slammed the phone into her hand, then got out the car and pulled the holdall from the back seat, before slamming the door and walking away up the track, switching on the flashlight app on his phone so that he could see where he was going.

  Feeling slightly better now, Brook got out of the driver’s seat and shoved the car keys in her jeans pocket and then, with the cell clutched tightly in her right hand, followed a few yards behind Logan. She didn’t turn on her own flashlight app, preferring not to be seen too easily.

  ‘Here it is,’ whispered Logan, stopping at a large hole the size of a small person in the chain-link fencing. The hole looked as if it had been made with strong bolt-cutters. Logan stepped through it, scraping the holdall on the ends of the frayed wires, and waited for her on the other side.

  Brook stepped through it, too, and saw they were on a paved walkway about five yards across, with the burned-out skeleton of a main building on one side and a row of large greenhouses, some of them with their windows caved in, on the other. Already the edges of the walkways had become overgrown with weeds and tangled bushes, and there were piles of junk that had been salvaged from the abandoned buildings dotted amongst them.

  She stopped and looked round. The night was clear and there was an almost-full moon sitting low in the sky, bathing the nursery in its pale-blue light. There weren’t, she thought, many places for the kidnappers to hide and, aside from the occasional hoot of an owl off in the distance, she couldn’t hear anything, either. It was hard to imagine that Paige was somewhere nearby, but Brook had to hang on to the hope that she was.

  ‘Come on!’ hissed Logan. ‘We’ve got to head to the other end. He said to go in a straight line.’

  Brook wondered how the kidnappers could possibly know when they got to the other end unless they were watching them, but maybe they’d set up cameras here, too, just as they had in their home. If that was true, it meant she’d been constantly underestimating them. It also confirmed that this was about way more than a quarter of a million dollars.

  The walkway crossed another and then narrowed, as the greenhouses gave way to a path running through overgrown brush about chest-height on either side, where Brook vaguely remembered they’d kept all the outdoor plants. She kept looking round, making for the line of trees up ahead that signalled the nursery’s boundary.

  A cold breeze shook the leaves on the trees and a bird cawed up ahead. Brook shivered, realizing almost with surprise that she was now leading the way, even though she hadn’t switched on her flashlight app. She turned and saw that Logan was five yards behind her. He was gazing from side to side, presumably searching for any sign of the kidnappers.

  But it felt as if they were alone out here, and now she wished she’d brought the gun. She was a good shot, and fast, too. When someone had once asked her if she could ever shoot another human being, her answer had been a resounding yes. That if her life, or the life of someone she cared about, was in danger, she’d do whatever it took to save them, even if it meant killing. And she’d meant it. Now, she felt naked without the gun.

  She stopped. She’d reached the treeline. The fence had been ripped away entirely here and, just ahead of her, the ground suddenly gave way to a steep twenty-foot drop down to a dirt track that ran parallel to the treeline below, and beyond that, more forest.

  Brook took a step back and turned round.

  Logan had stopped too, a couple of yards away. He put the holdall on the ground and gave her a strange, very intense look. ‘Give me the phone, Brook,’ he said quietly. ‘Please.’

  He took a step towards her.

  Brook took a step back. She didn’t like the expression in his eyes. ‘Let me talk to them,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll hand it back to you.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I have to have it.’ His eyes were pleading, but there was a wildness in them that she’d never seen before, and which scared her.

  He kept coming, and she knew she couldn’t retreat any further without going over the edge of the bank.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ he demanded, shaking his head angrily. And then, quick as a flash, his hand shot out and grabbed her right wrist, squeezing it much harder than she was expecting, to get her to release the phone. ‘Give it to me,’ he hissed, twisting her wrist painfully.

  Brook had done a lot of self-defence training over the years. She didn’t believe you could be a truly confident person without the ability to defend yourself from physical attack, and although she was shocked by this sudden assault, because it was not at all like her husband, she reacted fast, instinctively launching a palm-strike to Logan’s nose with her free hand.

  He howled in pain – the sound causing a bird to fly out of the tree overhead – and let go of her wrist, then bent over, holding both hands to his face. ‘You bitch!’ he cursed in muffled tones. ‘I can’t believe you just did that.’

  Brook exhaled and bounced on the balls of her feet, the adrenalin pulsing through her. She couldn’t believe she’d done it, either: she’d never struck anyone before in anger. She half-expected the phone in her hand to ring at any moment, with an angry kidnapper demanding to know what was going on. She even looked down at it, and so she wasn’t ready when Logan silently rose up to his full height and slammed his fist straight into the side of her face.

  The force of the blow sent Brook stumbling backwards, the phone flying out of her hand.

  And then she was falling through the air, smashing hard into the dirt and rolling down the steep incline, hitting bushes and tree roots, until finally she stopped at the bottom.

  Her head swam. She tried to open her eyes, but couldn’t. Her whole body burned with pain. She thought she heard Logan give a frustrated animal-cry that echoed through the trees, but she really cou
ldn’t be sure.

  Then the world seemed to drift away from her and she slipped into semi-consciousness.

  12

  Brook lay there, dazed and unmoving, for what felt like a long time. She half-expected Logan to scramble down the bank and tell her he was sorry and see if she was all right. But he didn’t. No one had come down here. It was as if she’d simply been discarded.

  Slowly, she lifted her head. It hurt like hell and, when she opened her eyes, her vision was blurred for a few seconds before slowly coming back to normal. Groaning, she rolled onto her back, staring up at the night sky. Logan was no longer at the top of the bank, and she wondered where he’d got to. She felt her jaw where he’d punched her. The skin was hot and tender and her face was already badly swollen, but it didn’t feel like anything was broken. Even so, the blow had been a good one, connecting perfectly and delivered with real anger. She still couldn’t understand why he’d done it. Just because she wouldn’t give him the phone? Logan might have been under a lot of pressure, but Brook would never have expected him to do anything like that. And then to have left her there, injured, maybe even dead. It shocked her.

  Breathing slowly, trying to ignore the pain, she listened to the sounds of the night.

  And that was when she heard it. The sound of a car pulling away somewhere off in the distance. It was coming from the direction of the nursery entrance, where she’d parked.

  At first she thought Logan had abandoned her. But then she remembered that he couldn’t have done, because she still had the car keys. She reached into her jeans pocket, just to confirm they were there, and immediately felt the oval key fob with Paige’s face on it, which had been a present from her daughter for her thirty-sixth birthday.

  This confused her even more. Because if it wasn’t her car that she’d heard, it had to be the kidnappers’. In which case, where was Logan? And, far more importantly, where was Paige?

  The thought that her daughter might be nearby spurred Brook into action. She sat up far too fast and immediately her vision blurred again and she thought she was going to throw up. She took a series of deep breaths and the fuzz in front of her eyes faded. Moving slowly this time, she got to her feet and pulled out her phone: 11.19. According to the dashboard on the car clock, it had been 11.04 when she’d parked the car, and it had only been a five-minute walk to get to the top of the bank, so she must have been lying there for around ten minutes.