by Linda Ladd
Claire, he thought dully. That’s Claire. Oh, God. Claire is in that room, that room with the bomb inside the locked drawer. But no way, she couldn’t be. It was another trick. She was at home. Wasn’t she? Or was she? Who was that? He was too confused to figure it out. It seemed odd that he could see her now, while his mind was reeling every which way with the colors and the soft chiming sounds they were making, lovely and low, and he desperately tried to remember how Claire had gotten into that room, if she was there at all. Then he did remember. Oh, God, no, Soquet had lured her there somehow, and they were going to kill her. They were going to blow her up with the bomb hidden in that drawer. They were going to kill her the same way Lorraine Soquet had been murdered. They were going to make him watch her die. Struggling desperately to free his arms and legs, he suddenly stopped and stayed still. Or was it all a hallucination? A distortion of his reality. A manifestation of his greatest fear. Was he seeing something from inside his own worst nightmare?
Black fought the terrible sensations evoked by the drug, knowing now that he had to get loose, had to get to Claire before that bomb detonated. She didn’t know it was there. She didn’t know it was there! But he could taste the colors in the air now, on his lips, smooth and sweet inside his mouth, and the orange tasted like maple syrup, and the red tasted like lemonade, and he was straining against his bindings, trying to get loose.
“No, no, don’t, don’t,” he thought he was saying, but Jaxy was laughing and the sound of it was echoing everywhere, and she was enveloped in the shivering rainbow of lights that made up his perception. He kept jerking, struggling, and then finally she unbuckled his restraints and set him free and stepped back away from him. He rose up to his feet, unsteady, but he was so weak and disoriented that he couldn’t think. He staggered to the screen, calling out to Claire, warning her to get out, get out, but he couldn’t stand up for long. He fell onto his knees and put his hands on his head and rocked back and forth, the acid trip suddenly turning very bad, the vibrant colors turning into hideous black shapes and the light fading into swinging lightbulb shadows and faceless monsters until he fell on his back and stared at the beasts crouched all around the room, shrieking and growling at him and clawing at his chest.
Little Boy Lost
When the nice woman named Claire yelled for him to run, Rico had raced as fast as he could into the dark woods. He was a real good runner. Once he got off that leash, Jaxy could hardly ever catch him before he reached the tunnels. But he was very worried about that Claire lady. Jaxy hated her even worse than she hated Rico. He could just tell. And Jaxy really hated Rico a lot, too. He was pretty scared they were going to lock Claire up in that room with that other guy, the one she kept asking about, the one she called Black. Jaxy was being really mean to him up there so she’d hurt that Claire girl, too.
Once he reached safety in the deepest shadows among the trees, he was fairly sure they couldn’t find him. He knew how to hide now. He hadn’t known what to do at first, when those bad people had come, or where he could go to hide. He had been so afraid after they shot his parents, scared to death they were going to shoot him, too. Especially Jaxy. The other one, Max, just sorta ignored him all the time, and he never had hit him or chased him. But Jaxy was afraid of Max.
Rico took off again, glancing behind him often as he raced through the tree trunks and thick bushes. Jaxy wasn’t chasing him this time. He couldn’t see her or anybody else in the night, but after a while, he could hear somebody thrashing through the undergrowth and coming closer all the time. Still, he was pretty sure that he could escape. He knew the land around the tower better than the bad people did; he had played all over the woods outside the courtyard walls.
Even better, he knew lots of hiding places where Jaxy and her men couldn’t ever find him. So he scampered on through the brush, but the sticks on the ground and sharp rocks hurt the bottoms of his bare feet. But he was tough now. Jaxy always said he had to be tough when she was around. And he was. He had learned it real good. He hadn’t been when the bad guys first came. He had cried all the time and wanted his mama and daddy. But now, he knew how to get away and how to hide, and they hardly ever caught him anymore, unless he got so hungry that he had to creep up to the kitchen and steal something to eat. That’s why Jaxy kept him on the leash all the time now. But he had stored a little bit now so he wouldn’t have to go to the kitchen much. But that had been the way Jaxy caught him the last time, so she could use him to be the bait to catch that big man in the white room. Jaxy called it her Fun Room, but Rico didn’t think that black-haired man was having much fun. Not when Rico had seen him.
After a few minutes, he stopped again and leaned against a tree trunk, panting hard, listening. Heaving in big gulps of the warm night air, he couldn’t hear any voices. He was very close to the front of the fortress now, and he could hear the ocean crashing into the big cliffs on the other side. Very relieved that he had gotten away, he squatted down in the dirt, resting and thinking about the pretty blond-haired lady. She was pretty brave for a girl. Nobody else had ever smacked Jaxy like that before. Not even the big men she was always ordering around, not even Max, who probably could if he wanted to. He smiled to think how that new girl had really walloped Jaxy up the side of her face. Jaxy had always been the one hitting people and making everybody scared. Rico was pretty afraid right now, too. He was afraid they’d kill the girl named Claire for hitting Jaxy. But Max had protected the girl instead of Jaxy. Rico didn’t understand why he did that, but he was sure glad he did.
Waiting there for a little while, he finally caught the sound of the Jeep out on the road that led up into the courtyard. He felt much better then. He was not going to let them catch him and put that shock collar back on him. That thing hurt him really bad when Jaxy pressed that remote control. Sometimes she tied him to the bedpost and pressed it over and over, just to make him cry. At first, he had vowed never to cry, but then, after that night, he cried pretty fast, just so she’d stop. Sometimes she did and sometimes she didn’t. She was just real mean, that lady. But she couldn’t catch him all that much anymore, now that he knew where to hide.
Peeking through the bushes, he saw a flashlight beam sweeping back and forth among the trees behind him. So the bad men were still out there searching for him. Rico took off again, running hard up the hill toward the fortress, staying inside the trees. The old ruins were underneath it, and if he could reach those Roman water tunnels that led down to the safe room, the men would never be able to find him. None of them even knew about those ruins. But Rico’s daddy did. Rico’s eyes burned with tears to think about how they’d just shot him dead after they’d gunned down his mama. He cried some, got his cheeks all wet, but then he wiped them away. He couldn’t be a cry baby right now, the men might hear him.
All he wanted to do now was find that Claire again. She had taken the shock collar off him and slapped Jaxy silly. All Jaxy ever wanted to do was hurt him. She liked to hurt anybody she could, so everybody stayed away from her, even her men. And now she was probably going to find a way to hurt that Claire lady real bad, too. And if those men behind Rico caught up to him, they would take him straight to Jaxy, and she would whip him and tie him to the bed and not give him anything to eat. But they weren’t gonna catch him, no way. He took off again, running as fast as he could.
When he reached the outer wall, he stopped and looked behind him. There was no light glowing in the dark now, just the faint glow of moonlight filtering down through the clouds and making everything look all silver and gray. The bad men had given up. Rico slid down to the ground and lay there on his back, looking up at the stars and resting some more. He was not very afraid of being out in the dark night anymore. The night hid him from the bad ones. An owl hooted somewhere nearby, a real creepy low sound, but that didn’t scare him, either. None of the night creatures scared him, not as much as Jaxy did. When she got hold of him, she just about scared the life out of him.
All he wanted to do now was find Claire
and tell her the good places to hide inside the fortress. He didn’t want them to hurt her the way they were hurting the big tall man with the blue eyes. He had seen them put their water hoses on him and knock him down, and he’d seen Jaxy hit him a bunch of times with her sap. He’d seen her kiss him, too, hold his head still while he tried to get away. They were going to kill him soon, he had heard Max say that, but they were waiting longer than they had done the other times they had put men inside Jaxy’s Fun Room.
Lying there, he started thinking about his family, about how all of them were dead and thrown into the ocean. He wondered where they were now, if they were out there behind the house in the sea, still floating on top or down under the water, or maybe lying on the sandy bottom of the ocean. He missed them so much, but he didn’t know where to go. Nobody else lived anywhere around them, and Jaxy’s men were watching everywhere. He didn’t know what to do, except to hide and try to find enough to eat.
When he heard the Jeep’s horn at the gate, he knew they were taking Claire inside the house. He had to get back inside the fortress and find her. She helped him and so now he had to help her. She said she would look for him. He wanted her to take him away from the bad ones, far away where they’d never find them again. So he jumped back up on his feet and took off running toward the fortress again, barely even feeling all the rocks and gravel under his bare feet anymore.
Chapter Nine
Novak and his team had touched down on an airstrip outside the French city of Marseilles, a good seven hours or more after Claire had left Cedar Bend Lodge on the helicopter. They had made good time, caught good tailwinds, and Nick Black’s GPS signal was blinking steadily at the same coordinates as it had been during the entire flight. He had not been moved, so thank God for that much good luck. Claire had not been so lucky. Novak’s greatest concern was that they would take her somewhere else entirely. If that happened, he knew that they’d never find her in time to save her life.
Novak also thought it was highly suspicious that they’d found both of Claire’s tracking devices but missed one of Black’s. He was their primary target, was he not? Why hadn’t they searched him more thoroughly? Or maybe he wasn’t the one they were really after. Maybe it was the other way around, maybe Claire was their target and they used Nick as bait to draw her to them. God, he hoped that wasn’t the case. She sure as hell had as many enemies as Black did, had really tangled with some dangerous people during her tenure as a homicide detective, no doubt about it. She had put so many people behind bars that it could very well be a grudge thing against her. She’d left others dead. Maybe it was one of their family members exacting vengeance.
Once the plane hit the ground and rolled to a standstill, Jack left his copilot on board to guard the aircraft. Black’s jet had been blown up while under guard. According to his men, he always left an armed pilot on board. Things were already out of control. Fortunately Booker’s copilot was an older man, retired military, maybe in his late fifties, but he was an old friend of Jack’s and a long-term employee at Holliday Aviation and was heavily armed. The aircraft would be safe enough with him. Jack told them the guy could be trusted, and Novak didn’t have any reason to doubt him. Truth was, Novak was suspicious of everyone connected with this mission. Mistakes had been made already, mistakes that might cost Claire and Nick their lives. They better not make any more.
Grabbing two heavy backpacks, one with his weapons and ammo, the other filled with enough military-issue M112 blocks of C-4 and blasting caps to take down a house, he followed Booker and Holliday down the lowered steps and out in the darkness and through a large field of tall wild grass to a double-door garage, completely hidden inside a thick grove of white oak trees. The night was very quiet, and when Booker unlocked and rolled up the right-hand door, the sound it made seemed loud in the stillness. The vehicle parked inside was a small, dark gray 2010 Renault, probably legally licensed and used for transportation whenever Black’s three-man team were on French soil. He still didn’t know exactly what kind of covert missions they embarked on, probably rescue ops or covert surveillance, but he did know enough not to ask nosy questions. Truth was, he didn’t particularly want to be privy to that kind of information. He had a feeling that it wouldn’t be good for his health.
One thing for sure, too, they sure as hell weren’t gonna tell him. He didn’t want to know why Nick was involved, either, a civilian and well-known psychiatrist. If he had to guess, he’d say it had to do with psyops missions so Nick was in charge and team leader and did the job very well. Nick was a smart guy, knew what made people tick. That would serve them in good stead most of the time but right now did the opposite. If Nick planned and executed their extraction operations, they were at a distinct disadvantage without him. Right now, all Novak wanted was to find Claire and Black, get them the hell out of France, and the sooner he could do that the better. Without a word spoken, the three of them stowed their gear in the boot space but kept their personal firearms close at hand.
“This car is licensed and legit over here, right?” he asked Booker, certainly not wanting to be picked up by the Marseilles police for some insignificant traffic violation.
“Yeah. We all have false identity papers and driver’s licenses, too. Do you?”
“Yeah, for about twenty years. Except all my stuff really is legal.”
“Good, your connections over here just might come in handy before this thing is done.”
Novak didn’t reply. He had lots of close relatives that he could call on for help if need be. He had already contacted a couple of them and given them a quiet heads-up about what was going down. He also asked them to try to find out where the Soquets had last holed up and if the chateau to which they were headed was the correct destination. They could do some digging without detection, and they were blood relatives. They would keep their mouths shut. The only thing they wouldn’t do for him was break French laws. But if Novak got caught doing something illegal, they could and would intervene. And that was a very good thing, since just about everything they were getting ready to do was completely illegal in France. Just the weapons and other munitions in their possession were enough to put them in a French prison for a long time.
Still, and all things considered, it appeared to Novak that Nick ran a well-trained and efficient team of paramilitary men, and Novak was glad to let them control things and set up the rescue attempt. He was just along for the ride and for additional firepower and to make sure that Claire made it out alive. She had shown him a helluva lot of courage when she climbed on that damn plane with a bunch of bomb-making, grenade-tossing terrorists, unarmed and unable to contact anybody for help. His two companions got into the front seat, and Novak sat in back by himself behind the passenger’s seat with his weapon on his lap. Marcel and his demon spawn had proved themselves adept at taking people down so he was going to remain alert until that entire Soquet family was either dead or rotting in jail.
Holliday turned and draped his arm across the back of the seat. “Nick’s got a safe house close to here, not far outta Montpellier. It’s got everything we’ll need to get into that chateau.”
“How far?” Novak asked.
“Fifteen minutes tops. It’s about twenty clicks outside Gardanne.”
Novak knew that village well; he knew this whole area of southern France. His uncle lived in Marseilles and worked in the city government. Armand also had a house in Paris now, but he kept his country home, too, a large chateau near the port. If worse came to worse, Novak could contact him for help. However, he didn’t want to involve any of his French kin in any way, not unless he had to. It could compromise them if they were to get involved.
Novak was fairly certain that the two guys in the front seat, who moved with such swift intention, confidence, and experience, knew exactly what they were doing and how to do it. They had to be good. He hoped to hell they were. He was just along for the ride because Claire Morgan had asked him to be her backup. He was glad to follow Booker’s leadership as
long as he used good judgment and kept a realistic grip on how to proceed without getting anybody killed. If and when they went off the rails, though, Novak would have to get Claire out of trouble on his own and let them concentrate on saving Nick. If Nick was even still alive. From what he and Claire had read in Black’s files on Marcel Soquet and his psychotic children, Black might already be dead or wishing he was.
But Claire probably wasn’t dead, not yet, and she probably wouldn’t be as long as she remained an important pawn in Marcel’s plot of revenge. She would be safe enough until they stopped torturing Black with threats against her, or even worse, tortured her in front of him. As soon as Black breathed his last, so would Claire. She would die hard at the hands of his mortal enemies. That’s how Novak saw it working out, with both their lives depending on Soquet’s attention span and thirst for revenge and just how long he would enjoy tormenting Black and making him watch Claire scream as horrendous kinds of injuries were inflicted upon her. Nothing was the least bit good about anything so far, and Novak worried that it was likely that nothing would turn out well for any of them. He was not a pessimist by nature, but Soquet was holding all the cards, and he sure as hell knew how to play them.
Thirteen minutes later, they turned off the highway and eventually reached the dirt road that led back through deep woods to the safe house. Booker had driven at a high rate of speed down A7 that wound its way along and not far off the Mediterranean Coast. The overgrown track barely accommodated the width of the Renault. Tree branches and bushes whipped against both side windows as Booker gunned the car along. They were now in a forest of conifers and oaks and all kinds of bushy green undergrowth that had probably never been cleared. Nick Black had chosen a good place for them to plan and reconnoiter. Very isolated. Very remote. One road in and thick, impenetrable forest on the other three sides for sheltered escape if ever the need arose.