“Once.” At first it seemed as if he would offer no more than that, but after a brief pause he added, “It can be a harsh place, but I think you will find parts of it beautiful.”
Then let’s hope that we end up in one of the beautiful parts, she thought. But she only said, “I’m looking forward to it.”
Thorn’s lifted eyebrow handed her the lie, but he said nothing, instead reaching over and laying his hand on top of hers where it rested on the handle of the bag she carried. He didn’t bother to offer her any soothing words. She somehow doubted he had any, but the fact that he was already planning for their future together reassured her far more than any facile words about how he was sure Jerem was fine and that this would all go off without a hitch. Whatever else he might be or do, Eryk Thorn looked at the galaxy through a set of keen, unsentimental eyes. If he thought they would come out on the other side of this relatively unscathed, well, then, that was good enough for her.
Still, she couldn’t help wishing the rough parts were well past them. Too bad that life didn’t come with a selective remote control, one that would allow you to skip over the frightening or dangerous sections. If only that were the case, then she’d push the button that would put her, Jerem, and Thorn safely on the Fury and flying off to Gaia, with the kidnappers vanquished and all the loose ends on Nova Angeles neatly tied up. But life didn’t work that way, unfortunately, and she knew they would all have to live through whatever lay ahead to get to that particular happy ending.
Miala glanced over at Eryk Thorn’s imperturbable features and wondered if he ever experienced such moments of doubt. It would be nice, she thought, to be that sure of one’s self, to never seem to experience a moment of indecision or fear.
She tightened her fingers around his, hoping to feel some of his strength bolstering her own sagging will. Let me be strong enough, she prayed silently.
Let me be strong enough to save my son.
“Well, dip me in shit,” breathed Creel, who had to read the terse automated message several times to make sure he’d gotten it right.
Jessa Kodd paused at the edge of his desk, green eyes widening slightly. “Excuse me?”
He looked up. “Sorry. But I think I’ve got something here.”
She set down the case file she was holding and walked around the corner of the desk, then leaned over his shoulder so she could get a closer look at his computer screen. A spicy scent wafted from her loose hair as she bent toward him, and Creel had to swallow and attempt to recall what had grabbed his attention in the first place.
“I tagged Mia Felaris’ bank accounts so I’d be notified in case of any unusual activity,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t notice his increased respiration. “Two standard hours ago she withdrew ten million in cash from a holding account she had on New Chicago.”
“Ten million?” Jessa’s tone was carefully neutral, but he thought he could hear the incredulity behind it.
“Just about emptied the account. There’s a couple hundred thousand left, but that’s it.”
“Think she’s getting ready to blow the system?”
He shook his head. Although Mia Felaris’ actions seemed to be those of someone preparing to pull up stakes and move on, somehow Creel didn’t think that was the case here. There seemed to be something else going on, some other motivating factor.
He just wished he could figure out what it was.
“I’m pulling in the security feed from New Chicago Central Trust now,” he said, watching as the flat video images scrolled past. They showed a normal weekday morning of patrons moving in and out, some tapping away on their tablets as they stood in the queue, higher-level customers getting one-on-one service from the bank’s various functionaries.
Creel let the feed continue on its loop, his eyes only half-focused on the flood of data. He’d done this enough times that he knew he’d catch the anomaly when it popped up.
And there it was.
Mia Felaris strolled in, accompanied by a nondescript-looking man in a plain dark suit. He stood off to one side while she went to speak with an older woman who obviously was a mid-level bank officer. After a few seconds, they disappeared into a private office. But the strange man continued to wait in the main lobby, his stance relaxed, his gaze appearing to continually move over the other patrons as they went about their business.
“Who’s that?” Jessa asked.
Creel shook his head but didn’t lift his gaze from the monitor. “Don’t know. Let me do a capture and see what the databanks have on him.” He paused the image, typed in the commands to have the image-matching software take a snap of the stranger’s face, and then waited as the computer began the process of trying to line up the pixels with the billions of records on file in the Consortium’s databases. The process could take a while, Creel knew, but it was an invaluable tool in a galaxy-spanning civilization that all too often had galaxy-spanning criminals as well. Of course, anyone who’d had a photo identification taken at some point in their lives was also stored in the database, but usually it was the shady types who tended to have more official “portraits” on file.
He turned away from the computer to see Jessa Kodd watching him with speculation in her cool green eyes.
“Think he’s coercing her?”
That had been Creel’s first thought, but somehow he didn’t believe it was the case. “I don’t think so,” he replied with a frown. Leaning forward, he tapped in the command to have the image back up a few frames, then watched carefully as the pair entered the bank. “You’d think she’d look more nervous around him. Look at the way he touched her elbow there—” He paused the image. It was the briefest of gestures, but somehow it looked as if the stranger were trying to give a reassuring pat to Mia’s arm before she went off with the bank officer. “If he’d been threatening her, she would have reacted negatively, even if she were trying to look cool. But instead she got that little smile on her face. I don’t think he’s forcing her to withdraw that money.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Maybe. All my research so far has shown she leads a pretty solitary life, though. Just her and the kid.” The kid, whom no one had seen since the house fire. The boy hadn’t been injured, as far as Creel could tell. He’d checked with all the local hospitals and clinics, and no one answering to Jerem Felaris’ description had been admitted to any of them. Maybe Mia Felaris had just stashed her son at a friend’s house. He wasn’t at the suite she’d booked in the Rilsport Plaza, either. Creel had already searched the rooms after she’d left and found nothing. For someone leading a quiet civilian life, Ms. Felaris seemed to know an awful lot about not leaving any clues behind.
The computer beeped, indicating that it had completed its search, and Creel swiveled back around to check out the results.
“Captain Galen Marr,” he read. “Shows he’s got a light cargo ship registered on Monteverde…looks as if he landed here on Nova Angeles two days ago. The vessel is right here at the Rilsport spaceport. Landing pad eighteen-twenty. Paid for a week of docking privileges in advance.”
“So they didn’t take his ship to New Chicago?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Must have traveled by regular shuttle.”
Jessa frowned. “Why would they do that if they had a private ship at their disposal?”
“Maybe it needed repairs or something.”
At that comment she shot him an unbelieving look, and Creel lifted his shoulders.
“All right, that doesn’t seem likely.”
“To put it mildly.” She glanced at the computer screen, as if trying to commit Captain Marr’s hard features to memory. Then she gave Creel a slow smile, a smile most men in the department would have lined up to be on the receiving end of. “Guess we’d better get going, then.”
“Going?”
In answer she reached forward and typed in the command that put his computer into locked-down sleep mode. “Landing pad eighteen-twenty. I figure this Captain Marr’s got to come back to his ship some time
...”
After hours of careful scrutiny—well, what felt like it, anyway—Jerem was convinced that the cameras watching his quarters were simple video units, no infrared or anything fancy like that. Of course he couldn’t just walk up to the cameras and inspect them without the kidnappers guessing he was up to something, but he’d gone back to the hand-walking, cartwheels, and anything else he could think of that would look as if he were simply an active kid who was going out of his mind with boredom. Who would ever notice that the cartwheels and somersaults usually brought him close to one of the cameras, or that the time he spent lying on his back, staring blankly at the ceiling, he was actually trying to focus on the compact pieces of photographic equipment, attempting to remember what his mother had told him about cameras and video surveillance.
Jerem knew that his grandfather—who had died before Jerem was even born—taught his mother everything he’d known about hacking into computers and writing security programs. When she’d started her own company on Nova Angeles, she’d taken that one step further, enhancing the practically hacker-proof programs she wrote with sophisticated surveillance equipment for those customers who needed it. She always had catalogues for the latest stuff lying around, and since Jerem had seemed interested in it (because although he would never have admitted it to her, he thought what she did was actually kind of cool), she’d explained some of the basics to him.
So he knew to look for the telltale film on the lens of a camera that had infrared capabilities, and how to tell if it could see into other spectrums—ultraviolet, for instance. Not that they’d need something that sophisticated to keep watch on a regular human boy. It wasn’t as if he could just turn invisible like one of those Specter creatures he’d seen featured on a particularly exciting episode of Moon of Syrinara. Too bad, because right now invisibility would have come in pretty handy.
But the second best thing to turning invisible was just disappearing, and now that he was almost certain the cameras wouldn’t be able to register his body heat, Jerem figured he could probably sneak out without anyone noticing. Or at least he hoped. He just had to wait for night to fall.
The same pointy-faced kidnapper came in around dinnertime—not that Jerem knew the hour, of course, but the hollow feeling in his stomach told him it had been at least four or five hours since lunch—and brought him a tray of some gluey-looking noodles with a heavy sauce. It looked pretty gross, but Jerem knew if he was going to make a break for it, he’d need to have eaten something. So he picked up the fork and plowed in, trying to ignore the nasty aftertaste the food left in his mouth and making a mental note to ask his mother for a big, juicy burger the second he got out of this hellhole.
The kidnapper apparently was ready to find fault in anything Jerem did. After a few minutes of watching him eat in silence, he demanded, “What’s up with you, kid? You seem awfully quiet.”
Jerem forced another glutinous mass of food down his throat and replied, “That’s because this food is so rank that I have to concentrate on not throwing up.”
“You’re lucky you’re getting anything,” the skinny man said, but he looked satisfied. Obviously Jerem’s rudeness had convinced him it was business as usual in the prison quarters.
“Yeah, tell my stomach that,” Jerem muttered, but he finished the food in grim silence, drank the glass of water that had come with it, and then pushed the tray away...but not before slipping the fork up the sleeve of his sleep shirt just as the man watching him glanced down at the chrono on his wrist.
The kidnapper picked up the tray, gave Jerem one last squinty-eyed glare, and then paused at the doorway. “Just behave yourself. Stay out of trouble, and if everything goes according to plan, you just might see your mama tomorrow.”
Even though he knew the kidnapper was probably just messing with him, Jerem couldn’t help feeling a stab of hope at those words. At least it sounded as if his mother had been in contact with them—probably to pay off the ransom. He wondered how much they were asking for, and whether his mother would be able to come up with it. Sure, they lived well, and there always seemed to be enough money for trips over the summer holidays and the latest toys and electronic gizmos for the house, but he got the feeling these guys probably were asking for a lot more than a couple thousand units. Otherwise, what would be the point of hiding him off someplace like this and feeding him and all the other stuff they’d probably spent money on?
The kidnapper was looking at him with suspicion in his close-set dark eyes, so Jerem said, “Okay,” and settled himself back on the bed, crossing his arms and trying to make it look as if he was so tired he couldn’t keep his eyelids propped open any longer. He wasn’t sure how convincing the act was, but after a “Hmpf” and a final once-over of the room, the kidnapper went out, letting in a brief glimpse of a dusky purple sky before the door shut behind him. Probably it wouldn’t be time to go to sleep for a few more hours, unfortunately, and he would have to wait until they dimmed the lights before he could move on to the next step of his plan.
Of course the kidnappers hadn’t turned out the lights completely the night before—they weren’t that stupid—but they had dimmed the illumination in the room to the point where you could at least go to sleep. Jerem knew he couldn’t do anything too obvious, but since his bed was in a corner, and the blankets were dark, he figured he could do a good bit of wriggling underneath them without anyone noticing.
Jerem shut his eyes, but he wasn’t about to fall asleep. For one thing, it was way too early, and sleep was about the last thing on his mind anyway. Instead, he lay there as quietly as he could, mind running over his plan and finding about a million holes—but, as his mother sometimes said, sometimes you just had to bite the power-pack casing and go for it. For a while he worried that his escape attempt might bung up the whole thing. After all, the kidnappers had made it sound as if his mother was cooperating, but of course they wouldn’t tell Jerem if something was going wrong anyway. Obviously they’d want him to sit quiet and not cause any trouble, no matter whether they were getting the ransom or not.
Best he could figure, if he were out of this room at least he would have options. Stuck in here, he couldn’t do much except sit and wait for them to free him or come in and kill him. And there was always a chance they’d kill him anyway even if they got the ransom, because Jerem had seen a few shows like that on the vid when his mother wasn’t paying attention. Not even vid shows always had happy endings, after all.
But if he got out, even though he had no idea where he was, he’d be doing a lot better than he was now, stuck in this stupid room like a rat in a cage. Besides, he’d bet money that his dad wouldn’t sit around doing nothing, waiting for a bunch of simps like these kidnappers to come in and do away with him.
That decided it. Jerem opened one eye and saw that the lights in the room had already been dimmed. It was time to show them they should have known better than to mess with Eryk Thorn’s son.
He made a show of pulling back the covers and wriggling under them. All he could do was hope that the kidnappers hadn’t noticed he’d kept his shoes on; he’d contemplated taking them off, but decided against it. After all, he didn’t know what lay behind that wall, and he’d seen too many shows where the hero had to run on broken glass or burning rock or whatever unpleasant item the writers could come up with for Jerem to think that going barefoot was a very good idea.
Once he was under the covers, he began inching toward the back wall. After he felt it touch his back, he began pushing the bed slightly outward. Slowly, of course—he’d found that it didn’t make so much of a scraping noise if it got pushed just a fraction of a centimeter at a time. It seemed excruciating, but somehow Jerem didn’t think about how long it was taking. Instead he just concentrated on making as little noise as possible.
Finally the gap between the wall and the bed felt big enough for him to slip down into. He grasped the pillow, wadded it up as best he could, and pushed it into the center of the bed, hoping it would make a reaso
nably boy-sized lump for the surveillance cameras to pick up.
Jerem slid down into the gap, feeling the cool roughness of the mud board scrape against his cheek. Once he had touched the floor, he reached out and felt around on the wall, trying to locate the edges of the rectangle he had spotted the previous day. His fingers found the crack, and he traced back along the outline of the opening, stopping finally at the bottom. Then he slid the fork out of his sleeve and pushed it into the crack, trying to lift up and outward at the same time.
At first it didn’t seem as if it wanted to budge. The fork made a horrible scraping noise, and Jerem froze, waiting for the inevitable angry hand to reach over the side of the bed and haul him out of his hiding place. But no one came, and he continued to work at it until he finally felt the edge of the thin mud board slip just a bit. With shaking fingers he reached under it and lifted it out, flattening himself against the ground as he did so in order to give the board enough clearance.
A black hole now gaped in the wall, a square of darkness that revealed nothing of what lay beyond. Taking a breath, Jerem squeezed in, noting how his shoulders touched the edges of the opening. At least he knew that none of the kidnappers would ever be able to fit in here.
He pushed himself along the metal-lined tunnel, and hoped he’d be far away before his captors realized that he’d disappeared right out from under their noses. With any luck, he could be long gone by the time day returned and revealed that their precious prize had evaporated with the night.
XXV
A wave of cool, damp air greeted Miala and Thorn as they disembarked from the shuttle at Rilsport’s main spaceport terminal. The last traces of sunset smoldered off to the west, leaving a bloody trail across the thin strip of ocean barely visible beyond the peninsula where the ’port was situated. They’d been gone barely eight standard hours, although still she was conscious of time ticking inexorably away. The kidnappers had given her two standard days, but she’d just used up one of them. Tomorrow, they would be expecting payment.
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