The van shuddered and bucked. An IV stand crashed down, smashing the phone from her fingers. The small device hit the floor and slid beneath a high-tech portable heart monitor.
The van stopped.
The sudden silence was deafening. Tears stung Nia’s eyes and she strained against her bonds. It couldn’t end like this. Couldn’t. There were too many things she still had left to do.
Too many things she had left to say to her father’s memory. To her mother, whom she’d drawn away from after his death.
And to Rathe, who was worth fighting for, whatever the cost. She had asked him for unconditional surrender, but had she been ready to offer the same?
The answer was simple. No. And she owed him better. Owed herself better. She owed it to both of them to try harder to make it work between them.
Because whether she liked it or not, she loved him. She didn’t just love the heroic figure in her father’s stories, she loved the grouchy, imperfect man himself.
She loved Rathe McKay.
Even saying the words in her mind brought a gush of warmth and a shiver of fear. She loved him, and might never see him again.
As if to punctuate that thought a door slammed. Moments later, the back door to the van rattled up, letting in a flood of midafternoon sunlight. They hadn’t been driving long, then.
“You’re awake.” Talbot seemed neither pleased nor displeased that she’d cleared the drug. He climbed into the van, shoved the IV stand aside, and kicked open the latches that secured the hospital bed to the floor.
“You don’t have to do this, Talbot. You can let me go and disappear.” Nia tried to get his attention, tried to connect with a man she’d once hugged for saving her father’s life. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
But the old doctor stared straight ahead and wouldn’t acknowledge her.
There was no sign of Cadaver Man. Puffing with exertion, Talbot collapsed the bed, pushed it to the end of the van and shoved it off. Nia’s feet dropped to the ground and for a moment it felt as though she would overbalance and slam to the ground face first with the heavy gurney atop her. But her captor righted the contraption at the last moment and banged her the rest of the way to level ground. She craned her neck and saw a clamshell drive off to one side of a graceful white-sided colonial.
“Where are we?” When he didn’t answer, she persisted, “Where are we going? Why are you doing this?”
Her voice trailed upward at the end of the last question. Incipient hysteria pressed at her throat, and her stomach roiled with fear. The scar where her left kidney used to be pulsed thickly with blood and phantom pain.
She took a breath. “Let me go, Talbot.” When he didn’t respond, she screamed at the top of her lungs, “Let me go!”
The sound bounced off the clapboard and brick wall of the high-class house and was deadened by a ring of pine trees. There were no neighboring structures in sight. A pig squealed in the distance.
Talbot frowned. “Shut up or I’ll drug you again.”
There was no more emotion in the command than if he was ordering a cup of coffee.
“Why are you doing this? Why? You’re insane!”
Lips compressed, he pushed the gurney onto a red brick walkway and followed it around to the back of the house, where a sunken area opened into an unkempt courtyard faced by a single door with office hours listed in flaking paint. “I’m not insane. I’m divorced.”
He said it as though the last two words explained everything.
Talbot opened the door and wheeled her through a small sitting area to a sterile-smelling treatment room beyond. “This used to be my office, back when I was married to my first wife, Eunice.” He pushed the gurney up against the far wall and kicked the wheel locks. “I had to take the job at Boston General when my second wife, Jolie, divorced me. And Yvette?” He scowled, though he didn’t look truly angry. “She’s just as bad as the others. I’d kill her, but why bother? This last sale will make me enough money to disappear. That’s all I want…to disappear.”
He stared at the blank wall for a moment, seemingly lost in thought.
“Please,” Nia whispered, weak tears trickling from the corners of her eyes to cool on the soft, laundered hospital sheet. “Please let me go.”
“I’m sorry, my dear, but I can’t do that. You’re a rare type, and just the perfect match for this client.” He glanced down at her, meeting her eyes for the first time. “Why do you think I requested help from HFH?” He shrugged as if to say, It’s so simple. “I need your kidney.”
Nia was still screaming when a needle prick in her thigh turned out the lights.
“I’M SORRY, SIR. There’s no trace of them on this level.” The officer spoke to Peters, but his sympathetic glance touched on Rathe.
“Look again,” he grated, refusing to believe she was gone without some hint, some clue. “You’re cops. Do your job.”
Peters touched his shoulder and Rathe shook the other man off. He wasn’t looking for sympathy. He was looking for Nia.
“Cadaver Man isn’t talking until he gets his deal from your D.A. friend.” He prowled the hidden stairwell, where the air seemed thinner now, as though the herd of bodies coming and going over the past fifteen minutes had cleared out some of the smell. “And no mat ter how fast that happens, we need the information sooner.” He spun on Peters. “Damn it, he’s got her.”
Saying it that way made it seem certain that she was still alive.
“We’ve checked the old blueprints, sir,” an officer called down from up above. “This is the only bomb shelter.”
Peters nodded. “Any luck with Talbot’s residences?”
“There’s just the one, sir, and there’s no answer, no vehicle. We’re waiting on a warrant.”
Which they couldn’t get until Cadaver Man—since identified as Carl Semple—worked his deal and named Talbot as the mastermind.
“Damn.” Rathe paced back up the stairs, following the blood trail and hoping it came from the guard’s head wound, not from Nia. “If they’re not in the hospital, and they’re not at his place…” He remembered crawling out of a trunk, crashing half-dead onto a Mass Pike on ramp. “West. They’re headed west.” When Peters shot him a look, Rathe said, “When they took me, they were headed somewhere west of the city. I escaped in Framingham, on the Pike.”
Which led to western Mass. New York. Michigan and Ohio, even. Suddenly, the umbilicus of hope that connected him to Nia seemed stretched too thin.
“Sir! Over here!” The excited shout brought them to the loading dock, where one of the hospital security guards had found a pill bottle.
“Cyclophosphamide.” Rathe’s throat closed on the word, on the knowledge that Nia had been on the dock, that she had tried to leave him a message. That it was too little, too late. “They went out this way.” He remembered that first night, when he’d been so staggered to see her that he’d barely registered the van pulling away. “Put out an APB for a laundry van. White. Maybe letters on the sides, I’m not sure. They’ll be heading west.”
“There’ll be a hundred white vans heading west this time of day.” Peters cursed. “We need more.”
“I know.” Rathe kicked the heavily armored door. “If only we had a way to track—” Peters’s cell phone rang. The noise sliced into Rathe’s brain.
DOC-JAK. The GPS system. If she had her phone, he could trace her.
In an instant Peters was calling for Rathe’s HFH phone to be recovered from the evidence room. They had it within ten minutes, were on the Pike in another five.
And as they screamed along, sirens wailing and local forces already en route to the scene, Rathe prayed like he’d never prayed before.
Let her live.
Chapter Fourteen
Nia surfaced faster this time. Her body was elementally aware of the danger and hadn’t let her sink too deeply into the drug. Or else Talbot had been sloppy with the dose.
Alone in the treatment room, which held a blend of old genera
l practitioner’s posters and new state-of-the-art equipment, she strained to make out the murmured conversation on the other side of the door.
“No, I told you, there are no security problems.” Talbot’s muffled voice held a hint of irritation. “The location was moved for both our conveniences, that’s all.” A pause. “Absolutely not. Nothing will be allowed to interfere with the procedure.” A loud sigh. “Of course your guards are welcome here, if that’s what it takes for you to feel safe. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
Silence. Nia’s brain raced. Talbot had been speaking with the patient who’d bought her kidney. The procedure must have been scheduled to take place in the bomb shelter, nearer their source of supplies—but the plans had changed. Twenty minutes. She had twenty minutes before the client arrived with what sounded like a security force. Bodyguards. Armed warriors with one job—to make sure the operation wasn’t interrupted.
She had to escape before then.
The door handle turned, giving Nia scant warning. She forced herself limp, closed her eyes and breathed slowly. She couldn’t afford another dose of whatever he’d been giving her. The effects were mild and short-lived, but still…
“You sleeping or pretending?” The voice was very close, and Nia tried not to flinch. “Doesn’t matter.” He didn’t bother to check her pupils. “You’re not going anywhere, regardless.”
Impersonal fingers pulled her shirt from her waistband, nudged her pants low on her hip, and probed the site where the incision would go. “Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing.”
He’d promised her the same thing five years earlier. Back then she’d been excited to help her father, scared of how it might change her life. Now she was terrified. And angry.
She ignored the fear and fanned the spark of anger. She’d need it.
“I’ll be back, dear. I need to prep the surgical theater.” He left her shirt awry, and she heard him move away, heard the door creak before he spoke again. “It may be more difficult to operate without my assistant, but we’ll manage, won’t we?”
Then the door closed and she was alone. She cracked her eyes open to be sure of it, then opened them all the way.
His assistant must be Cadaver Man, and if he wasn’t present, it meant… Hope bloomed in her chest. It meant Rathe had defeated him.
She knew there could be a dozen other reasons why Talbot was alone, but she grabbed on to that one. Rathe was alive, she could feel it. If he was alive, he was looking for her.
And he’d find her. She was sure of it. But she didn’t have much time left.
She glanced at the clock above the door. Fifteen minutes until the client arrived with his security force. She tugged at her bonds and found them tight, stared down at them and knew she’d never be able to break the thin nylon straps. But the sight of her bound hands reminded her of a med school rotation, when she’d seen a patient seize and twist against his restraints, winding up almost upside down on the bed, though the old man’s wrists and ankles had been firmly fixed.
And Nia had her plan. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it would have to do. But as she set to work, twisting and turning on the narrow gurney, all she could think was Hurry up, Rathe.
She was going to need him.
RATHE CLUNG to the door handle and braced his feet on the floor when Peters hooked off the Mass Pike and flew through the fast-lane toll at seventy miles per hour. “Won’t this thing go any faster?”
“Not without wings.”
“The locals in place yet?” He rubbed a hand across his sternum, trying to ease the ache.
“They have two men watching the place, with another ten on the way.”
Rathe knew that, he’d heard the radio squawk. But he needed to say something, do something. Ever since they’d picked up the GPS blip in a semirural section of central Mass, he’d felt as if they were racing the clock—and it was winning.
“She’ll be okay,” he said, more to himself than Peters. “She’s tough. Resourceful. Everything an HFH investigator should be.”
Peters said nothing. He reached across the car and clasped Rathe briefly on the shoulder, then focused on his driving.
They turned off the main road onto a maze of narrow, badly paved back roads, gravel pinging when the back tires slid.
“Almost there,” Peters said a moment later. “The dirt turnoff is two miles up.”
Nia’s phone was sending its signal from an old mansion Talbot had once owned. It was now in his first wife’s name, though the local cops said she hadn’t lived there for years.
Peters cursed when he narrowly missed the dirt road. He jammed on the brakes, backed up and slalomed down the track. Knowing they were near, that Nia was near, sent Rathe’s heart into overdrive with a poignant mix of terror and excitement.
They were going to make it. They would be in time, had to be in time. Failure was not an option. Rathe had said goodbye to her once before; he wouldn’t do it again. Not if it killed him. And it was in that moment that he realized something terrifying. Something elemental.
He loved her. Worse, he loved her not in spite of her bravery and insistence on working as an HFH operative but because of it.
He loved the woman she was, not the one her father had wanted her to be.
That was when the radio spat to life. “Sir? We have a problem.”
Rathe’s heart, which had sped up at his epiphany, stuttered and stopped. No, he thought. There was no problem. Everything was going to be fine. It would have to be.
He needed to tell her he loved her.
Peters toggled the reply. “What problem?”
“Sir, a group of armed men just arrived—and they’re not ours.”
NIA’S SHOULDERS AND HIPS screamed in pain. Her neck was bent back so far she could barely breathe. But when Talbot returned only a few minutes before the others were due, he cursed viciously, and she knew the agony had been worth it.
She feigned unconsciousness, the spinning in her head almost making the sham a reality.
“Damn it, not again.” He tugged at her shoulder and tried to roll her back over. “I hate it when they convulse.”
She’d been right in her guess. With his Boston General supplies cut off, he’d been using animal sedatives, which could cause seizures in humans. She’d worked her arms and legs into a contorted tangle, mimicking a writhing seizure.
And, most important, she’d forced her right abdomen deep into the gurney. There was no way he could get at her kidney unless—
“Don’t think I won’t break your arm.” Talbot’s tone was conversational, his hands rough as he tried to force her onto her back. “I don’t have time for this.”
Agony screamed through her, and the elbow she’d hooked over her head poked into her windpipe, graying her vision. She gagged and coughed.
“Ah, so you’re coming around. Come on then, sweetheart, give me a little help here.” Talbot coaxed her arm over her head, though Nia resisted as best she could without admitting she was fully conscious.
Outside, tires crunched on gravel. Car doors slammed in a rat-a-tat volley of company. Lots of it.
“Bugger. They’re here.” Finally losing patience with untangling her, Talbot pulled the restraints off her right wrist and left ankle. When he deftly flipped her back into position and yanked on her wrist, Nia reached up and grabbed his sparse white hair. She anchored his head and brought her opposite knee up with a vicious crack of bone on bone. Talbot groaned and sagged against her, nearly unconscious.
Triumph filled her, tainted with fear. No time. There was no time to lose. Heart pounding, fingers fumbling with haste and drugged weakness, she struggled to unbind her left wrist and right ankle.
Free, she shoved Talbot’s groggy weight off her onto the floor and stood. Her knees gave out and she sagged, catching herself on the gurney.
Damn it. She wasn’t as sober as she thought.
“Dr. Talbot? We’re here, where should we put Mr. Bronte?”
Nia froze. The voice was un
familiar, as was the name—but Talbot’s scheme was proof positive that money could buy just about anything, including her life.
Another voice answered the first, “Check upstairs, he might be in the main house.”
The voices moved off, but she was conscious of a sense of activity outside the little room, as though the place was alive with movement and whispers. It wasn’t safe out there.
But it sure as hell wasn’t safe in the treatment room, either.
She willed her legs strong, latched on to an image of Rathe outside waiting for her, straightened and crossed the room. Talbot groaned when she passed, but she paid him little heed. She didn’t have time to flip the gurney over and tie him to it, though the bastard deserved that and more.
He’d killed innocent people—mothers, fathers, husbands and wives—for money to pay off his debts. What was worse?
Fury spiked inside her and she glared down. “Bastard.” Then she turned her back on him, crossed to the door and cracked it so she could look out into the waiting area. It was deserted, but black-clad men moved beyond the windows, gathering around a long, sleek, stretch SUV. A hydraulic lift descended from the side of the vehicle, carrying a wheelchair. In it sat a silver-haired man, maybe sixty, collapsed in on himself as though he’d lost substance from within.
Nia remembered that look. Incredibly, she felt a spurt of pity, quickly quashed by the knowledge that Mr. Bronte, whoever he was, had purchased her kidney—whether or not she could spare it.
She had to get out of the clinic.
Footsteps overhead reminded her of the two speakers who’d gone to look for Talbot. They would return soon. Rathe hadn’t come to rescue her, so she would have to rescue herself.
But his absence beat at her, reminding her of Talbot’s threat and Cadaver Man’s absence. What if Rathe had been hurt? What if he’d been—no, she wouldn’t think of that. Not now. Not ever. Rathe was fine. He had to be.
But even through that declaration, grief beat in her chest. Grief that she loved him without reservation, guilt that she’d asked more of him than she’d been willing to give in return.
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