by Linda Ladd
Still holding the weapon, his finger along the trigger, Black walked around to the front of the car and stood looking down at the child. The boy wore a pair of red shorts and a torn black Star Wars T-shirt with Han Solo and Chewbacca on the front and no shoes or socks. He looked filthy, his clothes stained and wrinkled. His hair was long and curly and dark and a little matted in the back, as if he was a feral child and had lived out in the woods with wolves. Black took a step closer to him and spoke to him in Italian. “What are you doing out here alone, boy?”
That’s when the child dropped down on his knees in the gravel and wept harder, tears making tracks through the dirt on his cheeks. Frowning, Black glanced around again but saw no one, no cars, and heard nothing but the insects and the wind rustling the tops of the trees. He moved closer to the kid and knelt down in front of him, and then he placed his free left hand lightly on the child’s heaving back. “Are you hurt?” he asked him softly. “Where did you come from? Where are your parents?”
The child lifted his head and stared up into Black’s face. His curls were wild and unkempt and hung around his face, and his eyes were big and dark and reflected the car lights. They were glassy with tears, and he looked so frightened that Black took him gently by his shoulders and helped him stand up. The child’s muscles went rigid at his touch, and he quivered and sobbed harder. Black spoke again, in English this time. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you. Let me help you.”
The boy suddenly stopped crying and gazed at him again. Black thought he looked hopeful, as if he did want help. Then the kid lowered his eyes and stared at the gun in Black’s hand and looked terrified again. Black glanced around, and then he put his weapon down on the gravel and held his hands out, both palms forward, showing the little guy that he meant him no harm. The child took a step back away from him, and Black was pretty sure the kid was getting ready to bolt into the trees. Black spoke again, staying with English and keeping his voice low and soothing. “It’s okay. I promise I won’t hurt you. Tell me who you are. What’s your name? Where do you live? I can take you home.”
That’s when the boy spoke in quick, breathless gasps. “I wanna go home. I’m scared of the bad people.”
The boy sounded like an American, and that surprised Black. “Where are they? How did you get out here? Did you run away? Did they hurt you?”
The child put his hands up and touched something on his throat. Black peered down at it and realized that it was some kind of dog collar. Then he saw the long leather leash hanging off it. Black frowned. Then he became absolutely furious to think someone had tethered this little boy in such a way, like some kind of animal. “Come on, boy, let me get that collar off you and we’ll get out of here. You’ll let me take it off, won’t you?”
The kid looked so terrified then that Black thought he might actually collapse to the ground. Still squatting down, he glanced around again but saw nothing, heard nothing. Just the insects and a warm wind finding its way inland off the sea.
“Come on, now, let’s get that thing off you and find your mama. What do you say?”
The boy hesitated but just for a second. Then he came forward quickly and pressed himself up against Black’s chest. Black put his arms around him, and the boy clutched him tightly around the neck, his thin arms feeling very small, his breathing fast and frightened next to Black’s ear. Black hugged him back a little bit, and then he pushed him back some and unbuckled the collar. It was pink with little sequins on it. What the hell? Then the child’s body went completely rigid underneath his hands.
That’s when Black heard the crunch of gravel somewhere close behind him. He thrust the boy to the side, grabbed his weapon, and spun around. He stayed down in the crouch and then jerked to one side, away from the two armed men coming straight at him. They both wore dark clothes and had black ski masks pulled down over their heads. Black knew he was in big trouble, because he heard other men running out on the road somewhere in the darkness, a lot of them, but he didn’t waste time worrying about being outnumbered. He fired point-blank at the one closing in right in front of him, three quick shots to body mass, but the second guy hit him hard from the side and knocked him all the way to the ground.
Then Black was grabbed from behind by somebody who was very big and very strong. His gun arm was forced down, but Black twisted as hard as he could and broke the guy’s grip long enough to slam an elbow into his assailant’s throat. The man went down hard behind him, choking and gargling and grabbing his neck. Black lurched to one side and shot the second guy in the head, but then a third assailant came out of the darkness and got him in a deadly chokehold. Black rammed his elbow into his assailant’s torso and felt the ribs crack. The guy grunted and released his grip, but then another one grabbed Black’s gun hand and brutally twisted his arm backward. There were too many for him to put down by himself, but he fought as hard as he could, for as long as he could, pretty sure who they were and what they wanted.
When they tried to wrestle him to the ground, he kicked out desperately, determined not to be taken. But then something hard and heavy slammed down against his cheekbone. Excruciating pain exploded in a fireball behind his eyes and he staggered blindly, and then went down hard on his hands and knees, his mind reeling from the brutal blow. Seconds later, he was spread-eagled on his back in front of his car, with at least four guys holding down his arms and legs.
Then he heard footsteps coming toward him, walking slowly across the gravel. The men holding him were panting and grunting. He groaned from the pain in his right eye and lay still inside the headlights. All around him, the night looked smoky and blurry and surreal, and he could not get his mind to work clearly, his thoughts scattered and disjointed. He knew he had to get away, but he was too dizzy, too disoriented to free himself, and he knew it. His nose was bleeding profusely; he could taste the blood. His eye already felt swollen, and he tried to blink through the bright light and see who was bending over him. Then he realized that it was a woman. He could smell her perfume—Chanel No. 5. She went down on her haunches right beside his head and stared at his bleeding face. She spoke to him in English but with a French accent that he recognized as a Parisian dialect.
“My, my, Dr. Black. Here you are and in the flesh. Finally. You do know how to put up a good fight, now, don’t you? You just killed two of our best men.”
That’s when Black recognized her and knew without a shadow of a doubt that this attack was no random mugging or carjacking or armed robbery. These people were after him, and him alone, and they had him immobile and unarmed flat on his back on the ground. The girl taunting him was quite young, still in her twenties, with long dark red hair that was loose and hanging down around her shoulders. It shone with gold highlights in the brilliant headlight. She was wearing skintight clothing, black leather, a jacket that zipped up the front, and leather pants, and high-heeled black leather stiletto boots. She looked like some kind of ninja or a fashion model in a Japanese couture fashion shoot.
And he knew for sure who she was. Instantly and terrifyingly, he knew. Jaxy Soquet. Marcel Soquet’s psychopathic daughter. Both of them, along with her brother, Max Soquet, were Black’s worst and most dangerous enemies on the face of the earth. The father, Marcel, wrongfully blamed Black for his wife’s death, and he had vowed to hunt him down and kill him in the most painful, vicious way he could come up with. And he was vicious all right. All three of them were vicious animals. Marcel had tried more than once to kill Black, to no avail, but this time he had Black exactly where he wanted him.
Jaxy leaned down very close to his face, and Black’s muscles went rigid, tensed for the coming blow. She was known for her cruelty, for a pink weighted sap that she liked to carry; he knew that well. They were all cruel, everyone in the family. His captors tightened their grip on his limbs, pressing him down brutally into the gravel. The girl kept smiling, as if amused by it all. She had freckles on her face, lots of them. Tiny red ones. She pushed back her hair, grinning down at him. That’s w
hen he saw the indentation on her forehead, the one she’d gotten from a piece of shrapnel when her mother’s car had exploded right in front of her. He knew from his research that it had caused a brain injury that made her even more defective mentally than she had been before.
“Now, now, doctor, be a good sport about all this. We caught you in our trap, fair and square. Guess you’re just a sucker for little kids, aren’t you now? But it’s over and you don’t get to fight anymore. You are mine now, and you’re gonna stay mine. So you need to accept your fate and be a good little boy. Isn’t that what you expect from your own victims?”
Black stared up into her eyes, trying to think what he should do. He said nothing, trying to blink away the blood running down into his eyes. He was all alone, subjugated, no chance in hell of getting away from them. He had better listen to what she had to say. Right now, in this moment, he had no good move. No moves at all. Help was not on the way. Nobody knew where he was. Nobody was gonna come looking for him. Not for a long time, anyway. He was strictly on his own with armed people who wanted him dead.
Jaxy seemed to want to chat. The men held him pressed to the ground while she talked down to him. “How to capture you was our major problem, you know. That’s what took us so long to get you. You are well known to be quite capable of taking care of yourself. Well trained. Careful. Security conscious. Alert. But then I found out how much you liked little kids, how you treated many of them pro bono in your clinics. Just a big softie when it comes to little tots, now aren’t you? That’s when I knew that you would be a sucker for my little pet boy over there. Oh, yes, a helpless little child, all alone out in the dark in the middle of nowhere. And the famous psychiatrist Nicholas Black flies to the rescue. Hadn’t counted on you killing some of my men, though. I don’t like that one bit, doctor. Daddy’s not gonna like it, either. So you might not live through this night or you might, I guess. Can’t really say. Depends on his mood.”
“What do you want?” Black tried to appear as calm as he could, but he wasn’t calm inside. This was bad. He had no choice but to go along with whatever she said. Internally, though, he was furious at himself, that he had been so careless, so stupid to let himself be taken captive by these psychos. He knew better, damn it, he knew better. He had sensed something was wrong when he first saw the kid standing out in the road. He should have taken better precautions. But she was right. It was the child that got to him.
“As if you don’t know? But go ahead, plead ignorance. No matter. I am nobody that you want to get acquainted with, Dr. Black. Trust me on that. You are not going to like me one bit as the days and weeks drag by. But alas, it is too late for you to escape us. You will get to know me very well in the coming weeks, and you are going to suffer each time that we meet. But I will tell you this. I have looked forward to this moment for the last ten years of my life. Ever since you got my mother blown up inside her car right in front of all of us.”
Her threats had been uttered in a low and utterly cold-blooded voice, through smiling lips. Black kept his mouth shut after that and watched and waited for whatever the crazy Soquet girl was going to do next. She pulled a black leather bag off her belt. She unzipped a small pouch and pulled out a hypodermic needle and took off the cap. At the sight of it, Black’s muscles went rigid. “What is that?”
“Oh, it’s my special little treat for you so you will enjoy your ride back to your new home. Or should I say prison?” Then she looked at the men gripping him. “Hold him still.”
Black struggled as hard as he could, but his efforts were futile. There were too many of them. The girl grabbed his arm, and then there was the sharp sting of the needle entering his flesh. Absolute fear clutched him then, because once he succumbed to the effects of the drug, whatever it was, he would be completely helpless. He would not be able to think clearly enough to fight, and he would not be able to get away. He would become totally dependent on their mercy, and they had no mercy. None. He knew that better than anybody.
Black stared up at the girl’s freckled face and felt the effect of the drug almost at once. His mind just dropped down out of his reach, and his thoughts began to weaken and flake off until all conscious thought drained away. He fought against unconsciousness as hard as he could, but it didn’t take long before he could not move his arms and legs. Then the woman grabbed a handful of his hair, jerked his head up, and opened one of his eyes with her thumb and forefinger. Satisfied, she turned back to her men and spit out rapid orders, speaking in French this time.
“Okay, he’s out for the count. He’s not going to give you any more trouble. Get him into the van. We’ve got to get him to his plane and set the detonators.”
Black barely felt the rough hands grabbing him, dragging him through the loose gravel, and he no longer moved or thought or reacted but gradually went out like a snuffed candle, everything around him gone black.
Chapter One
July 4
Just before two o’clock in the afternoon, Claire Morgan sat inside her cabin at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, staring at her nearly unrecognizable reflection in the bedroom mirror. Today was her wedding day, which in itself was pretty damn hard to believe. It also was Independence Day, which put a bit of an ironic twist to the whole thing, for sure, and if one really thought it through. Looking at herself, she couldn’t believe it was really her. Almost a year ago, Claire had downloaded a photograph of a bride off the Internet and emailed it to her friend, Nancy, where she worked down in Lafourche Parish in Louisiana. The wedding gown in the picture had been exactly the way Claire wanted her own gown to look when she walked down the aisle and married Nicholas Black.
And, oh man alive, wow and yes siree, Nancy had nailed the thing. Claire now looked exactly like the woman featured in that photo. So much so that it was slightly unnerving, even to her. Eerie, even. Fortunately, however, Claire’s hair was no longer blue black from her last undercover assignment that had required her to become a brunette overnight. It had returned to her natural blond shade again and was fairly long, too. Now that Claire was teensy-weensy buttoned-up in the big and fancy wedding gown, though, it all was a bit of a trial. The dress was on the elaborate side, big-time, and one that had a high-necked and long-sleeved bodice, all made of lace, and two petticoats, and say, about twenty-five yards of white silk taffeta in the skirt alone, and lots of other stuff that Claire had never even heard of, like peau de soie, whatever the hell that was, and tulle, not to mention rose point lace, but, of course, the dress had to have all of that stuff.
It was a good thing Nancy knew about fabrics and the like, because all Claire knew was that most of it was scratchy and cumbersome and annoying. The things she did for Black, wow, and he better like it after all this trouble, that’s all that she had to say. But she did look like the aforementioned picture, even down to her makeup, and pretty much put together like in the photo. So voilà, she was not Claire Morgan anymore. Okay, she didn’t much like the girly transformation, not at all, but Black sure as hell would. Yep, he was gonna freak out big-time when he got a load of her all dressed up in all this fancy wedding getup all right. He probably wouldn’t even know it was her. Neither would anybody else who knew her.
Claire laughed out loud, just visualizing the expression on his handsome face when he saw her in this frilly bunch of crap with its intricate lace and pearls and all kinds of other fluff. Yes sir, the groom’s shocked expression was gonna be the highlight of Claire’s whole wedding day for sure. That and the second-best part, getting off the heavy-as-an-elephant dress that had to weigh a ton and the ridiculous amount of makeup slathered all over her face.
Yep, the rest of the wedding ceremony was gonna pretty much suck big-time, which was the way she always had felt about the sappy and syrupy and overly sentimental kinda weddings that Black was such a sucker for. That would be the kind with its seventy layers of cake with the itsy-bitsy bride and groom on top, icy spiked punch, a zillion flowers sitting around everywhere, high heels that made you walk funny,
and fluffy stuff to the max, but alas, all the fancy-schmancy agony had to be endured. But just for one day. Claire had her limits.
Truth be told, she would’ve preferred to just elope, find a Justice of the Peace in some tiny hamlet somewhere, tie the binding nuptial knot, and be done with the thing in one fell swoop and not a damn scrap of lace or stupid pearl in sight. But no, no, no way, Black had to have his traditional ceremony with oodles of everything and about a thousand candles, and all his old army buddies standing up with him, and all her law enforcement buddies dressed alike and standing with her. Oh, well. The pictures would look good. Of which, Black would probably order about six thousand.
But being the sweet and accommodating woman she was, on this occasion, anyway, she agreed to the ridiculous showy show of all shows, but now all she really wanted was to just hurry up and get it over with, already. Thank goodness, they were finally, finally, ready for the big moment to commence. Most of all, she was tired of making the wedding decisions without Black around, since he’d flown off to Italy, all excited and smiley, to make his no doubt over-the-top honeymoon arrangements.
Thank God, she had her good friends, Laurie and Nancy, to take all the wedding preparations into their extremely capable hands, both of whom had enough nuptial zeal and energy necessary to make wedding bells peal with joy and everybody sing out best wishes, happy, happy, and more happy. They had taken care of everything and had magically turned her front yard and little lakeside dock into a wonderland of white lattice, twinkling lights, tall white tapers, and greenery-draped arches, with about $50,000 worth of fireworks set to go off as soon as night fell over her cove on the lake. That last extravaganza donated by Black, of course. He did so like to light up the sky when he was feeling chipper. All of which Claire could do without, of course, but which she also thought looked very pretty but had the feel of some sugary chick flick. Maybe the kind with a happy ending. But alas, the things she did to make Black go all dimply, what was a gal to do.