CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A half hour later
October 12—10 A.M.
North Denver, Colorado
When Alex came to herself, she was sitting in a chair, with four men standing around her. Wrapped in rope, her hands were tied to her sides, and she was tied to a chair. She wasn’t sure what had released her from the semi-trance state. She was just here. Closing her eyes, she remembered waking up, the feel of John’s hands across her skin, the warm burst of water from the shower, and the rich coffee at breakfast.
God damn it, I left my coffee.
Opening her eyes, she looked from face to menacing face and smiled.
“Hello.”
“How dare you speak to us? Filth!” A medium-sized man stepped forward and hit her across the face with his open hand. He began screaming Islamic slogans at her in Arabic. His head was wrapped in a white turban, and he had a long salt-and-pepper beard. His eyes glowed with insanity.
“Do I know you?” Alex asked. Her eyes blinked at the sting of his slap. She looked at each face. They looked familiar, but she had not met them before. “Oh right, you guys are on the Homeland terrorist list.”
“You insolent little bitch,” turban man said.
The man with the turban hit her across the face with the back of his hand. He spat at her face.
Alex closed her eyes against the burst of pain and rubbed her bleeding lip against her shoulder. The man’s discharge dropped from her cheek to her shoulder. Alex shifted her shoulder, and the spittle dropped to the ground.
She had no idea what they would do to her. Eleazar was a sophisticated psychological terrorist. But these guys? These men were thugs, sadists so damaged by their delusions that they were willing to do anything to get what they believed they deserved.
She knew these men and men like them. She had trained, from the time she was ten years old, for the eventuality of meeting them in a room like this. She negotiated with them for the release of thousands of hostages. She knew what they were capable of. She opened her eyes to look from face to face again. Yes, she knew them.
But they did not know her.
With a slight nod of her head, she began singing songs in her head. She smiled slightly when the first song that came to mind was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
“What can I do for you?” she asked in Arabic.
“You can get our property.” A second man came forward. He spoke English with a clipped British accent. British-born Islamic extremist. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. Looking into his eyes, she saw his terror match his resolve.
“I am not sure what property you are referring to,” Alex said.
The Brit hit her face with his fist. Alex saw stars as her brain smashed against the back of her skull. She nodded slightly.
She heard her father’s voice echoing through the years.
“Stage One is the ‘terrify you’ stage. They don’t want information. They want to set the stage, destroy your hope, and make you more compliant to what will come next. They’re going to beat you up, give you something to think about, and leave you alone to think. The real torture and raping will come much later, after you’ve had time to think.”
A third man came forward, holding a knife with a gleaming ten-inch blade. He held the blade in front of her eyes, then pressed the razor-sharp blade against her throat. In one swift movement, he sliced into her left arm.
Alex ground her teeth together to keep from gasping and returned her focus to her songs—now “Hello Dolly.” She wondered idly why these old musicals always came up first.
Squeezing the muscle and sinew, he used the knife to dig out the standard-issue tracking device from her forearm. He held the device in front of her eyes on the end of his bloody knife. Dropping the tracking device on the floor, he crushed the device with the heel of his shoe.
“No one will find you now,” he said.
He ripped a filthy piece of cloth into long strips, and then he wrapped the strips around her wound.
“We want to keep you alive for a while.”
The men laughed in unison, reminding Alex of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland. One more to go before the leader calls it off . . . for now.
“Hello, Fey.” The fourth man came forward. “You probably remember me.”
Thinking, Alex squinted and then gave a slow nod. British Intelligence. Collected by mistake in a raid, he had been tortured at Abu Ghraib. She and the team rescued him and returned him to his family. British Secret Service believed that he still worked for them. Judging from the rubber pipe he was holding, they were wrong.
Letting out a breath, Alex turned the sole focus of her mind to “When you wish upon a star” playing in her head, the love in her heart, and a silent message to her twin. She felt the first blow, as the fourth man began beating her with the rubber pipe, and felt nothing else.
Her mind slipped into dreams and memories.
FF
“Why, Alex? Why do you have to be a Green Beret?” John, her husband of five days, asked.
He had just learned the origins of the scars on her back, her wrists, and her ankles. He was furious. Unable to look at her, he stood at the hotel window staring out at Santa Monica beach.
“It’s who I am. I’ve always wanted to be a Green Beret,” Alex said, moving to him. She kissed his neck and slipped her arms around his waist. “I made my Dad pinkie swear, when I was five years old, that he would help me become a Green Beret.”
“Your father is behind this? My God,” he said. He turned away from the surf to stare at her.
“I don’t think he had much choice. I would have done it with or without his help. I think he just wanted to give me the edge.”
FF
“Pumpkin, you have to remember that they want you to be afraid. The only way you gain an edge is by never showing your fear. How will you do that?”
They were standing in the kitchen of their Sixth Avenue Parkway home in Denver. Patrick set the dirty dinner dishes in the dishwasher, while Alex cleared the dining-room table after dinner.
“Songs in my head,” said a fifteen-year-old Alex. “I do that now when I’m at finishing school.”
Patrick laughed. “I wondered how you were getting through that. What else?”
“Put the fear in a box?”
“That works. What else?”
“Don’t get ahead of myself. Deal with each situation as it comes.”
“Rest when you can,” Patrick added. He poured dishwashing detergent into the machine.
“I have to believe that I can endure everything that comes my way.”
“And then some.” Patrick closed and started the dishwasher. “Ice cream?”
“Of course,” Alex laughed.
FF
Four hours later
October 12—2:00 P.M.
Olde Town Arvada, Colorado
Alex awoke with the taste of ice cream in her mouth. She was lying face down on a concrete floor. Before moving, her mind ran down her bones to see what was broken, what hurt, what damage was done. She felt the sharp pain of the knife wound. Nothing seemed broken. Rolling over, she groaned in pain at the knots, lumps, and bruises that covered almost every inch of her body. Gritting her teeth, she moved to sit up. Her hands ran down her body. At least nothing was broken.
She felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. Someone was watching her. Sniffing, she couldn’t smell anyone close. There must be at least one video camera monitoring this room.
With a grunt, she pushed herself to standing to check her surroundings. Three brick walls and one cement wall in a twenty by twenty foot storage room. While three fluorescent bulbs hung from the ceiling, only one bulb was lit. The light was dim in the bare, dusty room. She could see daylight from two thin basement vents. One door. Pressing her head against the brick, she heard nothing. One wall at a time, she listened. She heard a mechanical hum behind the concrete wall, possibly from a heater or water system.
Maybe
the door was unlocked. Pressing on the door, she saw that there was no inner handle—only a key opening for a deadbolt. She pressed her shoulder against the door but the wood held. She wasn’t getting out that way anytime soon.
Someone had placed a relatively clean empty bucket by the door and a sealed gallon of water. Clearly, they planned to leave her here for a while. She picked up the water, and she looked around the top and edges for a puncture. What her eyes did not see, her fingers felt. The water was drugged.
Alex turned the bucket over and stepped up to touch the wood ceiling. Pulling on a loose plank, she peeked into the space between the wood planking and the floor above. There was eighteen inches of insulation before the underside of the wood flooring above. No one would hear anything that happened in this room, but she would be able to hear people coming and going. Just enough noise to make her feel completely alone, and yet, no one would hear her scream, call or beg. Eleazar was good.
The light shut off.
Feeling with her hands, Alex went from hanging bulb to hanging bulb pulling on the chains. Nothing came on. Someone had set up the lights to give her hope, only to snatch hope away when she couldn’t turn the fixtures on. Yes, Eleazar was very good.
They had taken her shoes, her handgun, and her new engagement ring but had left her fully clothed in a pair of blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweater. She smiled when she noticed that they left John’s simple gold band on her right hand. The ring wasn’t worth much to them, but, to Alex, the ring was a precious connection to John. Slipping her hand under her T-shirt, she touched the diamond in her belly button and smiled. She was glad to have something from Raz.
When the lights were on, she had seen her leather jacket crumpled near the door. Feeling her way toward the door, she picked up the jacket and then dropped it. The jacket was wet with urine. Her only possibility of warmth was fouled. Knowing that she wouldn’t smell much different in a few hours—and not willing to risk getting too cold while she was injured—she put on the jacket. Feeling along the wall in the pitch-black room, she sat down in the corner farthest away from the door.
Alex stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Her fingers felt along the stitching of her right pocket until they found the loose string. Making certain that her movements were hidden from any night-vision video camera, she tugged on the loose string opening the cotton pocket to the inside of her blue jeans. Her fingers worked along the jean fabric until they found what felt like an extra stitching. Unraveling the stitching, she felt a thin piece of plastic.
Relief coursed through her. She broke the piece of plastic in half to turn on the GPS locator imbedded in the ball of her hip.
Letting out a breath, she forced herself into the sleep that her body needed to heal.
FFFFFF
Northern Scotland
Once again, John Kelly Drayson was on his way to the Scotland farm to avoid being killed. Within fifteen minutes of learning that Alex had been taken, he was sitting in the back of an armored vehicle on his way to Buckley Air Force Base. A jet to Iceland, then a commercial plane to Edinburgh under the name John Rasmussen. He was escorted by British secret service to the train station in Northern Scotland, where Tom Drayson waited for him.
Stepping off the train, John felt exactly as he had when he was fifteen years old—terrified and very alone. Tom Drayson touched his arm and caught him when he collapsed. John wept like a child. His sister Rita prepared his old room for him, and her boys tiptoed around him. No one knew quite what to say.
John tended sheep, mended fences, and cleared out stalls during the day. The hard physical labor helped soothe his anxious mind. The days passed without memory, but the nights were awful.
At night, he worked on his research paper, because it reminded him of who he was, and who he had been. He dreamt of Alex every night. His eyes bounced open every morning, his heart racing with the hope that she was lying right there under his arm.
The last time he had been in Scotland, he had so many big plans. He would study hard, move to America, become a doctor, make lots of money, and find her—the woman from his dream. He dreamt of her the night his father died. Then, after acknowledging his roommate’s sister’s first visit in more than two years with something intelligent like: “That’s cool, Max,” he fell into bed. Closing his eyes, he watched the same dream over and over again, until he awoke, exhausted, for class. He stumbled, barely awake, through his morning and barged in on her in the bathroom. She had just stepped out of the shower. One look into her laughing eyes, and his life changed forever.
He had achieved every dream the moment he met Alex; he lost them all the moment he failed to keep her from leaving the hotel. He knew it was irrational, but he blamed himself. He could have stopped her. He could have said something to break the trance. He could have . . . but he didn’t. And, in that one moment of inaction, he lost every single thing that he had worked a lifetime to achieve.
And the only thing that mattered—Alex.
Staring at the familiar ceiling of the room he had lived in more than a decade ago, he had come full circle. Starting with nothing, he returned with nothing.
Nothing but a fool’s hope that he might see those laughing eyes again.
F
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