by Gary Haynes
“I don’t think so. Listen, we should have this discussion face to face. But it has to be now.”
“Good day, Mr Dupree.”
“You hang up on me, you won’t last the day.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yes, it is,” Tom said, matter-of-factly.
He could almost hear Hawks’s brain ticking over on the end of the line. He’s thinking where, Tom thought. If he didn’t say the warehouse, which Karen had located on her laptop in Lester’s van, Tom would suggest the nearest motel. It was a mile from the warehouse and he would take it from there.
“Okay. But not here,” Hawks said.
“There’s a motel fifteen miles away called The Morning View. You know it?”
“I do,” Hawks said.
“The parking lot.”
“Give me a half-hour.”
“Sure,” Tom said.
“Alone.”
“I’m happy with that. But I’ll watch you come out and follow you there.”
There was another pause. “Okay,” Hawks replied.
Tom drove up almost parallel to the open entrance gate and pulled over.
62.
Twenty minutes later, a man matching Crane’s description of Hawks – thickset with curly black hair – walked across the front parking lot to a dark-blue BMW SUV. He wore a light-grey suit, which hugged his muscles as he strode out. Despite his size, Tom noticed a certain degree of agility and gracefulness in his movement, a gait that spoke of a trained body. Hawks got into his SUV and pulled out of the space, stopping level with the gate. The barrier lifted and he looked around. He’s clocked me, Tom thought. Good.
As Hawks drove out onto the road Tom started the Honda. He followed him out of Arlington County into the pig farms and cattle pasture of rural Virginia, seeing Hawks peering into the rear-view mirror on a number of occasions, checking he was behind him.
After driving past miles of whitewashed split-rail fences, Tom swung the Honda around a tight bend with acres of swaying crops on either side. He saw a rusted pickup truck blocking the road some thirty metres ahead. It appeared to have smashed into Hawks’s BMW. The hood was up, the windshield shattered, the scene looking kind of unnerving. There was no sign of Hawks, or anyone else for that matter.
It started to drizzle, the fine drops smearing the windshield, as the automatic wipers activated in slow mode. Tom saw a white guy stand up from behind the far-back door of the pickup. He started to walk toward the Honda as Tom slowed to a stop. He wore an expensively cut suit and didn’t appear to be concerned, his face grinning as he ambled along. Traits and apparel that didn’t sit well with the vehicle he’d been apparently driving, let alone the car wreck. He held up his hand, fingers splayed, and gestured to Tom to get out of the car, as if he were in need of jumpstart leads, or just a lift to the nearest auto garage. As he got closer Tom could just about make out that the guy’s hand didn’t have a spot of dirt or oil on it. No chance, he thought. He guessed that the scene was the best that could’ve been concocted in the short timeframe.
He stayed put, locking the doors remotely.
When the white guy was a metre or so away, he went for what Tom knew would be a piece under his armpit. He jerked the Honda into reverse and floored the gas pedal. Putting an arm over the top of the passenger seat, he twisted around. He concentrated on steering straight one-handed, ensuring he wouldn’t career into an oncoming vehicle, although the back wipers made visibility difficult at first.
After five seconds, Tom knew he was travelling as fast as the car would go in reverse, the engine sounding as if it were on the point of disintegrating. He jerked the steering wheel to the left, simultaneously engaging the parking brake. The car spun around roughly 160 degrees in what appeared to be a controlled skid, the tyres squealing under the pressure that the moonshine manoeuvre exacted.
But then the car tilted for a second, threatening to roll. Once he was sure the tyres had reengaged with the asphalt, he released the emergency brake and shoved the stick into drive mode, accelerating as fast as the automatic gearbox would allow.
Just then, a ten-wheeled truck turned into the bend, and Tom had to brake hard to avoid hitting it. He checked the rear-view. The white guy was running towards him, a cell to his ear and a handgun held upright at chest height. He turned back around. The truck had blocked the road with its grey bulk. It had feigned jackknifing, which wouldn’t look untoward to a random car coming up behind, and meant that the driver of the truck was a consummate pro.
The cab door opened and a black guy jumped down. He wore blue overalls, a ball cap and shades. He was carrying a pump-action shotgun in both hands. Tom couldn’t drive off-road, because irrigation ditches separated the asphalt from the fields. Accepting the situation, he rested his hands on the steering wheel just as the white guy got to him and levelled the handgun at his head.
63.
Proctor revived the secretary with smelling salts, her head snapping back as he put them to her nostrils. She lay on a single bed with fresh linen sheets, the makeshift cell, a damp basement room, formally used by servants. There were no windows, but there was a small wooden table and two chairs, and a table lamp with a white metal shade. She could read the books that were strewn on the table if she desired: a Bible and several tattered novels.
The burqa had been removed and she wore the Western-style clothes she’d been given in the cell back in Karachi. The burqa was literally an extra layer of security. If for any reason the coffin had been checked en route, there had been a good chance that no one would investigate further, the drug he’d administered paralysing the body and feigning death. That and the fact that most Muslim men would rather let something like that go undisturbed, rather than interfere with another family’s business. In France, there was no reason to be stopped, he’d figured.
He walked a few steps to the door, leaving her lying on the bed. “I’ll get you something to eat and drink,” he said. “It won’t be much.” He turned around and saw her nod weakly. “Do you need medical attention?”
“I’ve had enough drugs already,” she said, her voice little more than a murmur. “Can I speak with my family?”
“What do you think?”
She suddenly looked fully revived, her pale-green eyes alert, searching his face.
“Wait,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re being paid for this, but if you help me I’ll give you my word the US government will pay you double. That and a presidential pardon.”
She’s serious, he thought. She’s a resourceful woman. “Are you asking me to help you escape?”
“Yes. That’s it. You’re English. We’ll give you a new identity, everything. Call it a gold-plated witness-protection programme.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Where am I anyhow?” she asked, straightening up.
“Well, you’re not in Pakistan.”
“So you’ll help me?”
“Me? You’re not a person.” He sucked his teeth. “You’re a symbol. You became a symbol by virtue of your own ambition, and you’ll die a symbol by virtue of your own ambition.”
“They’ll find me,” she said, defiantly.
“Well, they’d better hurry up.”
He saw the uncertainty return to her eyes, decided to play on it. “No one will find you. No one would dream of looking for you here. Read your Bible, but remember, there is no such thing as God. Man just made him up to make sense of the senseless. We all die, missus, and then there’s nothing. You’ll just beat a lot of people to it.”
64.
“Get outta the car,” white guy said.
He was still pointing the handgun at Tom’s head. An Israeli Jericho 941, his hands overlapping on the grip. Tom unlocked the door and got out. The guy stood sideways on to minimize his exposure and guard his vital points. He had a lean, high-cheek-boned face. His eyes were pale blue and red-rimmed, which Tom put down to hay fever, because his body was well-muscled. The type that was addicted to steame
d fish and al-dente vegetables, rather than drugs or liquor.
“Hands behind your head. Kneel like you’re saying your prayers.”
Tom raised his hands, sensing that the black guy had come up behind him. He felt vulnerable. They could cap him here, take his body away in the truck and toss him in the Potomac, or bury it in a slurry pond. No one would even suspect anything, other than Lester and Karen. Crane, too, of course. But putting them in danger was exactly what he’d wanted to avoid. He calmed himself down, hoping that Hawks, an ex-CIA operative, wouldn’t kill him until he was absolutely sure that he’d extracted everything he knew. And he wouldn’t do that on a road, not even one in the Virginia countryside.
“Tom Dupree. You killed four Islamists with your bare hands in Afghanistan. A year later, you saved the Secretary of State’s ass again. Took a bullet for her. I’m right, ain’t I?” the white guy said, smirking.
“That’s cute,” Tom replied.
The guy hadn’t recognized him, Tom thought. He was reading from a script. One which was designed to humiliate him and make him feel as bad as possible in the circumstances. Then he felt the muzzle of the pump-shotgun jab between his shoulder blades.
“The man said kneel,” the black guy behind him said. “I don’t give a racoon’s ass who you are.”
Holstering his handgun and pulling out the cell he’d been speaking into a couple of minutes before, the white guy smiled and turned face on. A mistake. Tom kicked him hard in the groin. As he pivoted around, he caught a glimpse of him wincing and doubling over. Using his extended elbow, Tom struck the shotgun on the barrel. A shell discharged sideways into the air, the black man’s face turning from cocky to screwed in an instant. Tom kicked him hard on the outside of the kneecap. As he buckled sideways Tom hammered the hard edge of his palm into the black man’s temple. He crumpled to the asphalt.
Just as he turned to finish off the white guy, Tom was struck by what felt like the butt of a handgun, bludgeoning him on the back of his head. Falling, he got another whack before he hit the ground. But they were designed to immobilize him rather than smash his skull. He landed in a heap, moaning. A hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him over. He stared up into Hawks’s dull-grey eyes, and just saw the blur of the right hook before it connected with his jaw. The impact made him bite his cheek, drawing blood. Hawks pointed a Glock at him, and for a spilt second Tom thought he was dead.
“Get up,” Hawks said.
Tom struggled to his feet just as the white guy was rising, the other’s cracked mouth gulping air.
“Don’t even flinch, or I’ll shoot your balls off,” Hawks said.
Tom believed him.
Hawks nodded to the white guy, who grinned in return. Tom took an instep full in the groin and nearly passed out with the pain. He had tears in his eyes and clenched his already aching jaw to stop himself from crying out. Feeling as if he were about to puke, he heard the black guy getting up behind him and could guess what was coming next.
“Turn around,” Hawks said.
Tom turned, still half bending at the waist, and caught the stock of the pump-shotgun on his head, just behind his ear. It spun him around and he hit the ground again, wondering if this time his skull had in fact fractured. Jesus, he thought. Jesus Christ.
As the light rain fell they patted him down. Tom had left his SIG with Lester. If he was carrying, they would’ve expected him to use it, and if he had he would’ve had to kill at least one of them, which wasn’t his purpose, at least at this juncture. But he was thinking differently now. He hoped to hell that he hadn’t made a big mistake.
They secured his legs with gaffer tape from ankles to knees, and pulled his arms behind his back before taping them, too. Then his mouth got the treatment. He counted five layers. They weren’t taking any chances, he thought. He saw the cars move aside, and a black minivan appeared. They picked him up underneath his armpits, and dragged him forward across the slick ground as the van’s rear doors opened. The drizzle turned to a heavy shower and the sunlight disappeared.
65.
Tom lay gagged and bound in the back of the van. The men said nothing to him, and hadn’t attempted to torment or abuse him further. The tarp that’d been thrown over him as he’d landed on the metal floor of the van smelt of gasoline and mould and obscured his view. But the tyres hadn’t hit any potholes or zigzagged, so Tom was fairly confident that they hadn’t gone off-road or down a dirt track to somewhere quiet and remote like a quarry or woods. He decided to use the time to think things through, partly to dampen his growing fear.
Hawks appeared to be a resilient character, one who had partaken in shameful torture, according to Crane, but had had the ability to secure a top job with a major US corporation. That meant that either ADC had an inept HR department, which he doubted, or that ADC wasn’t particular about the violent tendencies of those it employed, which he also doubted. Hawks then had been employed for the particular talent he had displayed on the road a few minutes ago, and so Tom figured that ADC didn’t have the same core values as Starbucks. He concluded that those involved in the kidnapping with Hawks were ADC. And that meant the CEO and founder, Peter Swiss, was a prime mover; maybe the mover. But still he couldn’t work out the motive.
He sensed the van ease to a stop, but the engine kept ticking over. He guessed a gate was being opened, and strained to hear the telltale signs. But he couldn’t discern anything above the rattling, even though the engine was front-mounted. The van took off again, this time at a sedate pace, and swung around in a semicircle before the engine was finally killed. He braced himself for what was about to come, hoping that Hawks didn’t have a supply of oil stashed at their destination, together with a penchant for reliving the good times back in the day.
The back doors swung open and the tarp was ripped off. He felt rough hands on his ankles. He was dragged down the metal floor, and pulled upright. After his feet were freed with a butterfly knife, he was bundled forward by a couple of men with cropped hair and lean faces, who looked ex-military and wore off-white overalls and paint-stained construction boots.
As his angst spiked Tom told himself to be strong.
66.
The warehouse had cinderblock walls and a red-tiled roof, a metal fire escape at the far end, the lot surrounded by an industrial chain-linked fence topped with razor-wire. Steel poles held searchlights and infrared cameras in place. The lot was empty save for a Land Cruiser and a few dumpsters, overflowing with splintered plywood and polythene sheets.
Still gagged and breathing heavily through his nose, Tom was thankful that at least Karen had been right about the ownership of the place. Despite the violence that he knew was soon to be meted out to him, or perhaps because of it, he allowed his mind to wander to the contours of her face, the slenderness of her neck, and the gentle slope of her shoulders. He found himself thinking that he hadn’t been quite so attracted to a woman in some time.
As they got to the side door a punch in the kidney made him double over, and he groaned into the gag.
“Not yet,” said Hawks.
Tom winced involuntarily as the sun broke from a patch of cloud and cast shadows before him, his captors looking like giants on the cinderblock wall. Hawks opened the wooden side door and flipped a switch, activating harsh fluorescent strip lighting, which gave his face a pallid, light-blue glow, as if he were freezing cold.
The interior of the warehouse resembled an aircraft hangar and smelled musty. Tom guessed it hadn’t been aired for weeks. The floor was covered with stacked pallets, cardboard boxes, black-plastic trash bags and man-size rolls of polythene. A couple of red forklift trucks were parked around a staircase that rose to a steel mezzanine floor, its surface matching the shambles around him. Tom was flung to the dust-ridden ground. He still had his hands tied behind his back, and he landed heavily, his already aching head jarring.
“Now pick him up,” Hawks said, fetching over a metal-rimmed chair.
He nodded to it, and Tom was pressed do
wn into the seat, the two men standing either side of him. Then his makeshift gag was cut free. He took a couple of gulps of air before steadying himself.
“So, here we are,” said Hawks, standing about three metres from the chair.
“Beats life in a supermax for kidnapping,” Tom replied.
“That you or somebody else?” Hawks said, grinning.
“You made a big mistake taking her.”
“You think? For someone who won’t last the day, looks like I’m doing okay up to now.”
Tom spat blood. “You Swiss’s attack dog?”
Hawks smirked. “You know how this works. So, what do you know?”
“About what?” Tom replied.
Hawks nodded to one of the two men. Tom was punched hard on the cheekbone, his head twisting under the impact.
“You want to look like a piece of raw beef, that’s your concern. But you’ll talk.”
“About what?”
This time the punch came from the man on the other side, chipping a back molar and making Tom’s vision blurred.
“What do you know?” Hawks asked, his hands going to his lean hips.
“About what?” Tom said, his head feeling as if it’d been trampled by a carthorse.
Hawks walked over to the side of the warehouse, picked up a piece of hardwood about a metre long. He tapped his hand with it as he strolled back.
“We’ll see what gives first, your nose or the wood. My money’s on your nose.”
Tom heard the two men snicker. A forearm scooped under his secured arms behind his back, pulling him upright, as his head was grasped in a vice-like grip about his ears. He struggled to keep his head down, but it was forced up so that he was staring at the mezzanine floor.
He saw the plank of wood being lowered slowly toward his face, as Hawks measured the strike. This is going to hurt, he thought. Bad. A second later, he felt an oddly numbing pain, followed by a sharp pang like an electric shock passing through his brain. The sound was like two bricks being slammed together. He groaned, knowing that his nose had broken, the blood covering his nylon jacket and jeans. He barely kept it together, his head swaying back and forth, the grip being released at the last moment.