A gun barrel against his forehead was his answer.
“Do not move,” the man said.
Jack froze. The intruder was standing behind him. Jack could see only the shiny nickel plating of a revolver and the fist—a huge hand—that held it steady. Jack wished he knew enough about guns to tell if it was Russian made.
“Do what I say, and you live. One mistake, and you die. Nod if you understand.”
The accent was hard to discern. It sounded like he had cotton in his mouth to disguise his voice. Hispanic, maybe, but Jack was listening for hints of Russian. Rusos had been the cabdriver’s take; but, then again, Jack didn’t know for certain that those thugs had been Russian.
Cabdriver could have been paranoid.
He pressed the barrel more firmly against Jack’s forehead, then spoke again through the thick cotton. “I said: Nod if you understand.”
Jack nodded.
“Excelente,” he said.
Definitely not Russian.
“We are going out that door, and you are going down the stairs in front of me. You get a bullet in the back if you screw up. Got it?”
Jack nodded without hesitation this time.
“You learn fast, Swyteck.”
It chilled Jack to hear the man use his name. Not good.
“Get up now,” the man told him.
Jack rose. The barrel of the gun slid across his eyebrow and around the side of his head, coming to rest at the base of his skull. Theo was suddenly at the top of Jack’s list of worries—whether he was okay, whether the intruder even knew he was in the bedroom, whether Theo was waiting in the wings and about to do something heroic or stupid.
“Look, if it’s money you want, I—”
“Shut up,” he said. “I know what you’re trying to do, but it won’t work. Your friend Theo can’t hear you.”
Jack’s heart sank. “What did you do to—”
Jack dropped to his knees. With a mere squeeze to the back of Jack’s neck, the gunman had put him there.
“I wanted this to be easy,” he said, his thick voice hissing into Jack’s ear. “But I guess you like the hard way. Facedown, on your belly.”
The thought of Theo dead or unconscious in the next room was enough to make the room spin. Jack hoped it was the latter as the pressure of a gun barrel directed him toward the floor.
“Arms out, like on the cross,” the man said.
Flashes of resistance and escape raced through his mind, but Jack wasn’t even close to a plan of action. He extended his arms out on the floor, hands level with his shoulders.
“Let’s talk about this,” said Jack.
“Let’s not.”
A needle pierced his skin, and Jack recoiled at the cold pressure of fluid entering his body through a syringe.
“Back to sleep,” the man said. “Then we’ll take a little ride.”
Chapter 23
Jack’s eyes blinked open, but only for an instant. The light was unbearable. He waited a minute and tried again, squinting this time, giving his pupils a chance to adjust to the brightness. Slowly, the strange room came into focus.
He was on his back. A bed was right beside him, but he was lying on the floor. Not the smooth Cuban tile he remembered from Vivien’s apartment. This was rough, unfinished concrete. A bare bulb hung by a wire from the ceiling, the assault to his eyes making it impossible to open them fully. He tried to sit up but could only go so far. Both his wrists and ankles were chained to the metal bedframe, and there was enough slack to move no more than a foot in any direction—left, right, or upright. The chains rattled as he lowered himself back to the floor.
Whoa, head rush.
That simple up-and-down motion stirred the fog in his brain, reminding him how the ordeal had started: the gun to his head, the jab of the needle, the slow loss of consciousness. Many hours had passed since then, he was sure of it. The bladder doesn’t lie.
Man, I gotta go.
“Jack, you awake?”
The familiar voice made his pulse quicken. Theo was in the bed. “Thank God you’re okay.”
Theo extended his hands over the edge of the mattress, showing Jack the cuffs. “You call this okay?”
“Better than what I feared. How did you end up here?”
“Fucking weird. I mean, I’ve gone to bed in one apartment and woken up in another one before. And being handcuffed to a bed is nothin’ new. But this is the first time I went to bed in one place, woke up handcuffed someplace else, and got no memory of any of it. Three beers never make me pass out like that.”
It had actually been more like seven or eight, Theo having downed more than anyone, but the point was still valid. “It wasn’t the beer,” said Jack.
There was a knock on the door, which seemed odd. The door had an opening at knee level, like a mail slot, and a hand emerged, holding a smartphone.
“Do I hear talking?”
The voice was mechanical, like Siri on the iPhone, so it was impossible know if it was the same man who had put the gun to Jack’s head. One man or two, one thing was clear:
The guy doesn’t want us to know his voice.
The phone withdrew through the slot, then reappeared. “No talking,” Siri said, “unless I allow it. Turn around and face the wall.”
Jack rolled on his side, his back to the door. Theo did the same. Jack heard the door open, and he lay motionless as the click of leather heels on concrete drew closer.
“I need a bathroom,” said Jack.
It took a moment, and he could hear the man typing on his smartphone. Then came the mechanical response: “Okay. But from now on, it’s every six hours. I am not getting up every time you have to piss.”
Jack was suddenly reminded of his golden retriever.
“I need to go, too,” said Theo.
More finger-clicking on the smartphone, then Siri: “One at a time. Swyteck, you’re first.”
Jack suddenly felt a blindfold over his eyes. It was strange how, even though he was already chained to a bed, total blackout made him feel so much more like a hostage. Jack heard the lock at his ankles click open, then the lock at the bedframe. His wrists remained shackled.
“Get up.”
Jack rose slowly, wary of a trick, half-expecting the chain on his handcuffs to tighten and jerk him back to the floor. It didn’t happen, but the probe of a gun into his spine dispelled any sense of relief.
Jack felt the man’s hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I’ll direct you,” the Siri voice said. “Just keep putting one foot in front of the other until I say stop.”
Jack started walking, each step calculated to be as close to two feet in length as Jack could measure. He counted. Ten steps, then a left turn. Another five steps and he stopped on command.
“Stairway,” the Siri voice said. “Twelve steps up.”
Jack’s mind went to work. A floor of rough concrete. A room with no windows. Stairway. Holding us in the basement.
Jack climbed. A heightened sense of aural awareness came with sight deprivation, and he noted the unique sound of each creaking step. They stopped at twelve. Right turn. Five steps, stop. The blindfold came off. Jack was looking into a bathroom.
“You got two minutes,” said Siri.
Jack hesitated, hoping he would leave and close the door, but doing everything at gunpoint seemed to be the order of the day. Hopefully, a bullet in the back while peeing wasn’t this guy’s idea of death with dignity. He got another minute to wash his hands and face. His stubble cried out for a shave, but there was no offer of a razor. Just as well. The bathroom had no mirror, and he probably would have hacked himself bloody.
As soon as Jack dried his hands and face in the towel, the blindfold was back in place. The return walk to the basement stairs, however, was longer than expected. Nine steps instead of five. The blindfold came off again, and Jack found himself in a different room. It had windows, but they were darkened by storm shutters on the outside. An old card table, a small lamp, and a folding chair were
the only furniture. The voice was still Siri:
“Sit and face the wall at all times.”
Jack took the only chair available, keeping his eyes forward. Behind him, his captor closed the door. In the silence, Jack heard him punch out a number on his phone. Jack could hear him talking, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. It wasn’t even easy to discern the language he was speaking. But it sounded like Spanish.
Okay, he’s not working alone.
Jack heard him cross the room, still speaking into his phone. Jack kept his eyes forward as the man approached from behind and laid a notepad and a pen on the table in front of Jack. The man ended his call. A moment later, Jack felt a gun at his temple. The man thumb-typed a message into his phone, and audible instructions from Siri followed.
“Write down exactly what I say.”
Jack swallowed hard and picked up the pen. He knew he was about to write his own ransom note.
Or his obituary.
Chapter 24
Andie was looking for her car. Actually, Viola’s car.
The approved budget for Operation Black Horizon included a vehicle, but typical FBI snafus had delayed delivery. Andie’s instructions were to pick up a white Ford Taurus with Virginia license plates anytime after eight p.m. on day three of Operation Black Horizon. It would be parked on Twenty-third Terrace, a quiet residential street in an old section of Alexandria. The keys would be under the driver’s seat.
Andie followed the sidewalk from the Metro station, walking alone in the suburban quiet. A nearly continuous row of parked cars lined the curbs on either side of the street, precious few spaces open. A rush of wind stirred the leaves overhead. A few fluttered in the cool night air and fell in Andie’s path, but it was still a bit too early for northern Virginia’s red maple trees to surrender to autumn. Halfway down the block, she cast a casual glance over her shoulder. She thought she’d heard footsteps behind her, but no one was in sight. Up ahead, the sidewalk darkened in the shadow of older, larger trees. Gnarly old roots had caused entire sections of weathered concrete to buckle over the years. Low-hanging limbs blocked the light of the streetlamps, allowing Andie to see only a few cars ahead of her, making her search for the Taurus more difficult.
Would it have killed them to drop it off at my apartment?
Again she heard footsteps. She walked faster, and the click of heels behind her seemed to match her pace. She stepped off the sidewalk and down off the curb, as if she were going to cross the street. The sound of the footsteps behind her changed right along with her own, from heels on concrete to heels on asphalt. She returned to the sidewalk and heard the clicking heels behind her do the same. She kept walking, almost certain that she was being followed. All doubt was removed when the white Taurus came into view. A man was leaning against the car that was parked directly in front of it, waiting. And she could still hear the footsteps approaching from behind her.
A double-team.
Andie stopped and checked her phone. It was exactly the thing she had warned countless young women never to do—stop to read text messages on a dark street, oblivious to all surrounding danger—but she was only playing dumb. Her phone was set on the front-facing camera mode, the narcissist’s dream for photographing her own face. By angling the lens over her shoulder, Andie could use it like a mirror, no need to turn around to see what was coming behind her.
The mysterious footsteps emerged from the darkness, the image came into view on Andie’s screen, and her fears dissolved into confusion. She recognized the face. It was one of the agents from the Virginia field office—her undercover handler.
“Walk with me,” he said as he passed.
Andie put away her phone and matched his casual stride, her confusion growing. Her undercover protocol called for meetings with her FBI handler at specified times. This was not one of those times.
“What are you doing here?”
“From the standpoint of maintaining the integrity of the operation, headquarters thought it was preferable to sending an agent to the apartment and pulling you.”
“What do you mean, ‘pulling’ me?”
“Family emergency. That’s all I know,” he said.
Two words no one ever wanted to hear, but it didn’t quite ring true for Andie. She had gone into undercover work with the full understanding that no “family emergency” was reason enough to get pulled from an assignment.
“Where are we headed?” she asked.
“Just ahead. To that blue car parked right in front of your Taurus.”
The one with the man standing beside it. “Who’s the guy?” she asked.
“Secret Service agent.”
“Secret Service?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re going to the White House.”
Family emergency, huh?
“Okay,” she said. “This should be interesting.”
Jack was alone in the basement, chained to the metal bedframe. He wasn’t sure if it was day or night. Assuming that his captor had been true to his promise of a bathroom break every six hours, however, Jack calculated the passage of twelve interminable hours since his first break. It had been somewhere between six and twelve hours since his graduation from the concrete floor to the prison-thin mattress—since Theo had last gone upstairs at gunpoint, yet to return.
Jack was getting seriously worried.
He heard the door open at the top of the stairway. The mechanical voice of Siri told him what to do: “Face the wall.”
Jack turned his back to the stairs and waited, listening to the approaching footsteps. Jack couldn’t see him, but he sensed his captor was right behind him.
“Where is Theo?” Jack asked, more a demand than a question.
The man laid a paper bag on the floor in front of Jack. Jack heard the click of typing on his smartphone, and then the mechanical response: “Don’t worry about your friend.”
Jack was trying to figure out the smartphone technology. He assumed it was some kind of medical app for mutes. “There’s no reason to hurt him,” said Jack.
His captor stepped closer, still standing behind him, his shadow hovering over Jack. The mechanical response followed: “Shut up, before I stick another needle in your ass.”
It was the most bizarre thing Jack had ever heard through Siri.
The man reached over him, and Jack feared another syringe was coming. But he was just reaching for the paper bag. As he reached, the man’s sleeve rode up over his wrist, exposing an eye—a tattoo above the right thumb. Jack averted his gaze so as not to convey that he’d taken note of it.
The eye disappeared into the paper bag, and the man handed Jack a sandwich. The chains around his wrists had only enough slack for him to rise up on his elbows to eat. It was his first meal in captivity, and it was edible only because Jack was starving. The minced meat was unidentifiable. Maybe pork.
His captor typed another message, then played it on his phone: “I’ll be back for your next bathroom break. If all goes according to plan, it might be your last.”
The two very different interpretations of those words were not lost on Jack. He chewed slowly, not sure which meaning to take, as his captor turned and walked away.
Chapter 25
Andie’s White House meeting was in the West Wing. It was relatively quiet at nine o’clock on a Sunday night, especially with the president and his family staying at Camp David for the weekend. A stoic Marine in dress uniform escorted Andie to the office of the chief of staff. Andie had never met Jim Murphy before, but he was that rare breed inside the Beltway whose forte was cutting government waste. The president often alluded to the fact that it was a young Jim Murphy who had rooted out the five-hundred-dollar hammers in the Pentagon budget while at the Government Accounting Office.
The other man in the chief of staff’s office was family. Harry Swyteck rose and embraced his daughter-in-law.
“Everything is going to be okay,” he told her.
Harry Swyteck was Florida’s most distinguished s
enior statesman. After two terms as governor of the fifth most populous state in the nation, he’d received serious consideration as a vice-presidential candidate. He got out the vote, even if he wasn’t on the ballot, and he continued to have strong White House connections. Tonight, he needed them more than ever.
Andie took a step back, looking him squarely in the eye. “What is the ‘family emergency’?”
“Jack has been kidnapped. But he is going to be okay.”
Andie had delivered such news to the families of victims, and her own reaction on the receiving end was no different from what she had seen in others: little else registered after the word kidnapped, and promises that “everything is going to be okay” counted for very little.
The white-haired chief of staff stepped out from behind his desk and offered similar words of concern and support. At his direction, they moved to a small seating area by the window, Andie and Harry on the camelback couch, and the chief of staff facing them in a striped armchair. Harry did most of the talking for the next five minutes, explaining the “family emergency.”
“Right after lunch today Theo showed up at my house. He said he and Jack were kidnapped in Havana.”
“Jack went to Cuba?”
“Yes. Anyway, on Saturday night they were sleeping at an apartment in central Havana.”
“An apartment? Who does Jack know with an apartment in Havana?”
“Theo said the young woman who lived there was named Vivien. He didn’t know her last name.”
“Doesn’t know her name?”
“She was a friend of another woman named Josefina. Anyway, Theo says that the four of them had a few beers at the apartment and—”
“Stop!” said Andie. “Jack I trust. Theo, uh-uh. Are you about to tell me that Theo got my husband kidnapped by a couple of hookers in Havana?”
“No, no!” said Harry, suddenly aware of how this must have sounded. “That’s not where this is going at all. This was investigative work for the lawsuit Jack filed against the oil consortium.”
“I’ve seen the news reports,” said Andie.
Black Horizon (Jack Swyteck Novel) Page 12