Together, we ran to the end of the hall and I tried to not think about Red watching us from the center of her surveillance room. Tried to not imagine a group of armed guards heading our way to take hold of us, all of us, and throw us one by one into those locked, dark rooms hundreds of feet beneath the ground.
At the door, we stopped while I slowly opened it and checked Emerick’s room. I was afraid there would be guards, guns, large heavy boots running towards us. None of those things were in the room, but what I saw made my blood run like ice through my veins.
Emerick was gone.
An inch at a time, I backed away from the door and closed it.
“What are you doing?” Caleb whispered in my ear.
I stared at the door, uncertain about what it might mean. “We can’t go that way,” the hysterical edge to my voice exposed the panic that was building in my chest.
“What?” Sophie asked. “Why not?”
I turned and stared at the floor. “Because he’s gone.”
“Who’s gone? What are you talking about Charlotte, we need to get out of here.” Caleb said.
“Emerick,” I breathed. Caleb and Sophie both exploded with questions at once—what did I mean—why would we want Emerick in the room anyway. I couldn’t answer, my mind raced over and over what it could mean.
That empty chair.
Where was he?
“Charlotte?” Caleb grabbed my shoulder.
I turned and looked into his eyes, “We have to find another way out.”
“What other way?” Caleb pointed at the door. “We have a way right there.”
“No, you don’t understand.” I shook my head, frustrated and unable to explain everything I needed to fast enough. “Emerick is not where I left him—so I think he could be waiting for us.”
I didn’t know what to do. Think Charlotte. “There has to be another way down here,” I said, not at all certain that there did need to be another way, but logically, “Would anyone build an underground fortress with only one escape route?” I asked out loud.
Caleb stood up straight, “Because, what if there was a fire,” he was talking to himself, working it out, but the realization hit us both at the same time.
“A back door,” my eyes met his and then we both stared down the long white hallway towards the opposite end behind us.
At first, it looked only like a flat white wall. But off center, and a few feet from the floor, a thin silver cylinder, so small we could barely see it from this distance, seemed to be mounted to the wall.
“Come on!” Caleb grabbed Sophie’s hand and began dragging her back the way we had just come.
“What now?” Sophie moaned but allowed herself to be pulled along. “I’m beginning to think neither of you has any bloody idea what you’re doing.”
We reached what I could now see was a door cut flush into the wall. “Then what you’re thinking is right,” I said and pulled the handle. I expected it to resist, to be locked, so when it opened, my body was washed in relief and then fear.
Directly in front of us were two sliding silver elevator doors—with a coded keypad.
Every part of me sank. How? Caleb and I looked at each other at the exact same time and I saw my disbelief mirrored in his eyes.
Something thumped behind us, and when we all turned around, we saw four of Emerick’s men, and Red, shoving through the door that led to his office. “Stop!” One of them shouted.
“Charlotte!” Sophie screamed as her eyes locked on the advancing team coming to lock us all back up.
My brain buzzed and I backed up to the doors, pressed up against them with Sophie clutching my arm. Suddenly, I turned to Caleb, “The base code!”
My words seemed to shock Caleb out of a panic induced stupor and he lunged towards the keypad.
“Try the base code without the door number!” I shouted even though Caleb was already dialing in numbers as fast as he could with both his thumbs.
When he finished, he turned to me, “Nothing’s happened.”
“The light?” The men and Red were halfway down the hall and would reach us at any second.
“There is no light!”
It was impossible to tell if we guessed correctly until I felt it. Like a miracle delivered, the doors to the elevator began to slide open against my back. As soon as the opening was wide enough, Sophie and I both shoved ourselves through it and Caleb pressed in behind us.
“Stop right there! Stop!” The shouts from the team echoed off the hard walls of the hall and filled the small elevator. Two of them raised their machine guns and pointed them towards us. “Stop or we’ll shoot,” one warned while the other gripped his gun in preparation.
I held Sophie behind me as best I could while Caleb repeatedly hit the top button on the panel. A second later, the doors began to slide shut and I heard the first rounds of gun fire explode in the air. On instinct, Sophie and I crouched down as far as we could in the corner and covered our heads with our arms and hands. I prayed for the doors to close faster but had a sinking feeling that Emerick’s men would reach us first. At any moment, I fully expected to feel either a bullet driving deep into my body, or hands grabbing me and dragging me out of our corner.
The sounds of shouting and guns and boots running filled the elevator all around us, until suddenly, it all stopped.
CHAPTER FORTY
You are Here
The high pitched ringing in my ears was so loud, I couldn’t hear anything else.
What happened?
Was I dead?
Something moved beneath me and when I pulled back I saw Sophie. She uncurled herself from the corner, her mouth was moving—I couldn’t hear any of it. Only the sound coming from my own head.
What happened? I turned around and saw that the elevator doors were closed—CLOSED. Caleb sat against the wall near the buttons, his arms resting on his knees, like he had been unable to hold himself up any longer and had simply slid down the wall. Tears streamed from his eyes and his hands shook violently until he pressed them against the tops of his knees.
His eyes moved to me, then his sister, a ragged breath shook his chest.
We were safe—for now.
We were safe until those doors opened again.
The ringing in my ears was getting fainter and the sounds of the elevator, the hum of its electric movement, the buzz of the florescent lights, was starting to become discernible to me. The relief I had allowed myself was being pushed away by a new fear—I stood up.
What would be waiting for us on the other side of those doors when we finally reached the top? “Are you okay?” I asked Sophie still curled in the corner.
She turned her head and gave me a look—like I must be both stupid and insane.
“I mean…were you shot?”
“No,” she sat back and looked herself over. “No, I don’t think so.”
I nodded at her. “Then you have to get up,” I reached my hand out to her and when she took it, I helped pull her to standing. On his wall, Caleb wiped his face and began pushing himself up as well. Without saying a word about it, we all seemed to realize that there was a very good chance we were not out of danger yet.
We faced the doors.
“What will we do?” Sophie asked.
“I’m not sure—” but the rest of my words died on my lips.
We weren’t going to have any time to figure it out—the doors were opening. I clenched Sophie’s hand, reached for Caleb’s, and braced myself for whatever was coming next. Fully expecting our escape to now end with more men, more guns, and a return trip to Emerick’s cells—what I saw before me was a huge shock.
People.
Not guards, not guns, not Emerick himself—normal looking people, in business suits. They were standing right at the door, and one man, when he saw us, stepped to the side to make room.
For us, I realized. He was making room for us to get off the elevator—because all these people were waiting to get on it. As if it were just another elev
ator in any other building.
It was Sophie who moved first, “Excuse us,” she said stepping forward and pulling an obviously stunned Caleb and me behind her. I glanced at the elevator panel and saw that, while Caleb had pushed the top button to get us out of Emerick’s personal dungeons, what was now illuminated was the round button next to the number one.
Once we were out of the way, the group of people waiting began to pile in. They selected floors by reaching or calling out, “Quatre s'il vous plaît.” Then stood facing us while the doors shut and the elevator, presumably, carried them up higher.
We were in the lobby of an office building. With a high ceilinged atrium and enormous glass windows, crowded escalators that carried people in dark suits and bright silk scarves to the second floor, and a security desk manned with bored looking guards checking employee identification badges.
“Come on,” Caleb whispered in my ear and jolted me out of my stunned silence. “We need to go.”
I nodded and, still holding Sophie’s hand, followed him through the crowd of busy people towards the large revolving doors that led to the outside. A few people, noticing our dirty clothes and bruised faces, stopped and stared at the three, probably homeless, teens that seemed very out of place in this professional place of business.
One woman, with an especially sympathetic face, stopped us by touching my arm, “Es-tu blesse?”
I didn’t understand French, so I smiled and nodded even though I knew my bruised and beaten face did not convince her.
Sophie pulled me away from her. “Oui, très bon madame,” she said. “Tres bon.” But the woman’s expression only looked even more suspicious of our circumstances. As we hurried away from her and finally began pushing through the glass revolving doors, I glanced back and saw her standing at the security desk and pointing us out to one of the guards as we made our way onto the open street.
Through the thick glass, I saw him keeping us in his sight, probably mentally cataloguing our descriptions, while he picked up a phone. “Keep walking I said,” looking away from him. One thing was for certain—this building belonged to Emerick. And while none of these people probably knew it, every single one of them worked for him in some capacity or another. That woman was only worried about us, and the security guard was probably calling the police to help us—but those men who worked for Emerick under this facade, they would almost certainly be listening in on that call too. They couldn’t have been waiting with machine guns for three teenagers in the lobby of a prominent office building without causing chaos, but on the streets, it would be easy for them to drag us back without raising too much alarm.
We needed to find somewhere safe to hide.
At the end of the building, out of the guard’s sight, I let go of Sophie’s hand. “Run!” I said, and with our next steps, the three of us were sprinting down a busy street, somewhere in the middle of France, with no idea where we were going or who might be following us. Randomly, we made lefts, rights, cut through alleys, our feet pounded beneath us in a wild panic that was only about getting as far away from that building as possible. After blocks and blocks of running, my body sick and weak from everything I had been through in the last week, we stopped.
In the middle of the sidewalk, in the middle of a city I didn’t know, I stopped and bent over, my hands resting on my knees while I gulped for air and fought back the wave of unconsciousness that threatened like a black curtain at the edge of my brain.
“Charlotte,” Caleb urged. “What’s wrong? We have to keep going.”
I shook my head, “I can’t.”
I had to stop. I had to rest. I needed water. Food.
“We have to,” he said.
“She can’t!” Sophie shouted. “Look at her,” she came and stood beside me. I felt her tiny hand rest on the middle of my back. “She’s about to fall over!”
“Well, we can’t just stand here! We need to find somewhere to hide, some way to get in touch with Nigel.”
We needed to find some way home.
I wanted to go home. Fiercely. I wanted to see my father, but even he wouldn’t be at home.
Suddenly, it came to me. I raised my head and looked at them both. “Are we in Paris?”
They both looked around the street as if there might be some giant sign we missed like YOU ARE HERE—PARIS, and right beside it would be the Eiffel Tower.
“I think so,” Caleb ventured.
I closed my eyes and prayed he was right. “We need to find Shakespeare and Company.”
They both looked at me like I was insane.
“It’s a bookstore, in Paris.” I stood up and didn’t allow myself to be swept away by my body that was begging for me to just lie down on the concrete right in front of me. “My father, he was scheduled to appear there this summer. They might help us.”
It took us fifteen minutes to get the bookshop clerk to even come remotely close to believing that, not only did I know Simon Stephens, but that I was, "...his daughter. Really!" I found his books on the shelves and pointed, "This is my father." I even flipped to the dedication pages, "Look, this is me. I'm the Charlotte here. His daughter." But with no pictures, no identification of any kind, and looking like I just crawled out of some drug infested fight club in the sewer, I realized the internet might be my only prayer.
Over the years, my father had dragged me to several of his book events, awards, signings, once he even visited my own school and I thought I might die, and I had always hated the fake, over-posed photographs that everyone insisted I participate in—except now.
Once we got him to search both my name and Simon's there were years and years of photos that proved I was who I said I was.
"Has he been here yet?"
"Yes, last week," he looked me over again and again, as if trying to answer some question about how the healthy showered girl in those photos could end up the way I looked now. "Sales were not that good—he was drunk you know." Like this statement somehow made sense to him considering that I looked like I was probably a junkie of some sort too.
"Please, can I use your phone. I have to call him."
Twenty minutes later, after many panicked questions that I couldn't fully answer, Simon Steven was rushing to the Frankfurt airport to catch a flight back to Paris. Before he hung up, he spoke with the clerk and begged him to let us stay at the store until he arrived.
My father was coming.
I was, I realized, going to have to tell him everything. EVERYTHING—from last year, and this. All my mother's secrets.
He would be crushed.
In the back of the small, cramped store, Caleb, Sophie, and I collapsed onto a tattered blue sofa and I fought the urge to weep from the relief of finally allowing my body to stop.
Under different circumstances, I would have loved being in this shop. The books were stacked from floor to ceiling in every possible available space, even the triangle of wall space that was under the stairs. With such a small location not even an inch of it was free from books. But I was too tired, too injured, too scared, and too worried, to enjoy any of it.
The clerk, who seemed unaccustomed to interacting with people who had bigger problems than making a worthy book selection, nervously brought all three of us a glass of water.
All three of us practically lunged at him, nearly knocking the glasses out of his hands before we gulped and gulped and gulped until every last drop was gone. Water had never, in my whole life, tasted so good.
The guy watched us, slightly stunned, slightly amazed, "I'll...bring some more," he said before collecting the glasses and leaving.
The water helped my thirst, but nothing else. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the top of the couch. Along with everything else that hurt, there was the sharp sliver of pain that had settled near my heart. The sound of my dad's voice had placed it there, his confusion, his panic, his rush to get to me as soon as possible. I dreaded telling him anything, I wished there was some way to protect him from the truth of our liv
es.
But we were long past all of that.
Exhaustion dragged at my brain and, surrendering, I allowed it to pull me down, deep, deep down. Far away from here and every thing that was wrong.
I would worry about my father when the time came.
Later, when I opened my eyes, it seemed like only a few moments had passed. It wasn’t true. I realized I had been sleeping for at least several hours because, I could see, the time to face my father was now. Right in front of me.
"Charlotte," my father kneeled and grasped my shoulders. He stared into my eyes with an intensity that was hard to face. “My god, what’s happened to you?”
I looked back at him, stared into his eyes, searched his face, tried to think of where I could possibly begin—but all the words I might have used only got lost in the emotion of seeing him here. “Dad?” I cried.
Still scared, still confused, he shook his head and pulled me into his arms. “What on earth has happened?”
He held me for a long time before I could speak again, and when I did, the first words out of my mouth only confounded him more, “I know where mom is.”
My father took us all to a hotel where we could sleep, eat, shower, and wait for the private jet my uncle Nigel was sending from London. Aaron, poor Aaron who had been left to die in a cold dark cave in the middle of China, miraculously, was recovered. Clinging to life, he was too weak to leave that country and was being cared for in an Intensive Care Unit at the Sichuan International Medical Center in Chengdu.
“We’ll transport him back to England as soon as he’s strong enough,” Nigel promised.
I hoped it would be soon, I owed Aaron my life. At the very least, I wanted the chance to look into his eyes and tell him so.
My father, being an international thriller novelist, didn’t need much convincing when we explained about Emerick, Eastern Star, or the Bilderbergs. My father was well versed in conspiracy theories due to all the research he did for his books over the years. “It’s like the characters from my books have come to life,” he said.
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