Gone Black

by Linda Ladd

  As they bounced their way over rocks and brush, a low structure eventually loomed up, a farmhouse that looked pretty much identical to any other old French country building built years ago and now displaying weathered white stucco walls. It was built with the steep roofline and tall casement windows so often used in the French countryside. A small structure sat out behind the house, backed up to more thick woods. Yeah, Nick had chosen well. Novak doubted if more than a handful of people even knew the place existed, which made him feel a little more secure about Nicholas Black surviving whatever atrocities were being done to him. As a Ranger, Nick would have been trained in SERE, all the special ops teams were. Novak was, too, when he was in the SEALs and working his own covert missions in enemy territory. Survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. He hoped Claire knew something about those techniques, too. But he was afraid she didn’t. She was not military, but she was a very well-trained and gutsy police officer.

  Nick probably planned everything these guys did and used in their missions, and down to the last letter, and made damn sure all their covert ducks were in a row. This was another reason to wonder how and why he’d been taken so easily by the Soquets. Or maybe it hadn’t been so easy. Maybe he put up one helluva good fight before they took him down. Still, the man had to be aware, was definitely aware, according to John Booker, that Soquet had been gunning for him. That should’ve made him wary of any kind of trap. Especially when he traveled in Europe.

  The farmhouse had been closed up tight for a long time. All the windows were shuttered, the house securely battened down. Everything was quiet in the yard, the leaves rustling on the spreading limbs of the oak trees nearest the house. Birds were roosting as if nothing was so terribly amiss. Booker and Holliday quickly and silently cased out the place on foot, looking for signs of intruders, moving around opposite sides of the farmhouse, but they found nothing suspicious and unlocked the front door with the key Nick kept buried in an air-tight container under the third flat paving stone on the garden path.

  Once inside and the house cleared, Holliday went through the rooms unlocking and opening windows. It was stuffy and stifling hot inside, but it looked like any typical farmhouse, and Novak had been inside plenty. Sparsely furnished, peeling white paint on thick stucco walls, heavy arched wood doors, and tall French windows in every room. This place had been around a long time, probably a hundred years or more.

  As the other two men busied themselves setting up laptops and a portable satellite dish, Novak began to grow impatient. Procedure and preparation were fine, precautions necessary, but two people Novak happened to care about were about to die in the most vicious way imaginable, and they were wasting a hell of a lot of time. “We need to get this show on the road, Booker. They don’t have this kind of time.”

  Booker glanced over at him from where he was typing quickly on the computer. “We always prepare for every eventuality. It saves time in the long run or if we have to fight our way in. You know that.”

  “Yeah, I do know that, but I also know quite a bit about Marcel Soquet now. He’s not gonna keep them alive forever. He’ll tire of them once he breaks them, and I think you know it. Another thing, I’m as surprised as you are that he’s actually brought them back so close to his home turf in Marseilles. That’s not smart, and he is very smart. He has to be, as long as he’s evaded capture by INTERPOL and every other agency in Europe.”

  “Yeah, but Nick’s the grand prize in his eyes. He’ll keep him alive a long time so he can sit back and watch him suffer. That’s what he does when it’s personal to him. He takes plenty of time to enjoy it. Nick told me as much. He said this was what Soquet would do if he ever got his hands on him. And he knew they’d go after Claire, too. That’s why he made us swear to keep her out of it.”

  “Which we didn’t.”

  But they should have listened to Black. He had been right and now they had lost contact with her. Booker was right in his assessments, though, and Novak knew the other two men were suffering as much guilt as he was for involving Claire in such a dangerous way. Still, Novak was uneasy, impatient at the delay, and ready to move in.

  “Okay, let’s get to it. We’ve already discussed how we’re going in. We know from the sat images that he keeps guards all along the perimeter wall. We’ve gotta take them out first, and we’ve gotta do it without setting off alarms. They’re most likely keeping him on the third floor or in the cellars, maybe. We’ll have to get in without being seen, make it past the guards after we get inside the house, and check out both areas. There’s no other way to get to him, not that I can see. It’s pretty simple but dangerous as hell. Once we find him, we’ll probably find Claire, too.”

  Jack nodded. “Okay, after we take the guards down, we separate and go in quiet, take out his men as we find them with silenced ARs. There are probably too many of them for us to attack with guns blazing, not with just three of us. You both got it?”

  Novak had heard enough. “Okay, let’s go. Waiting around is gonna get them killed. I’m telling you. We don’t have this kind of time. From what I’ve read, Soquet’s unpredictable. He might give in to his rage and just kill them quickly.”

  Holliday turned to Novak. “C’mon, Novak, you’ve got to be patient. We cannot rush in there. It’s got to go down quietly, or we don’t have a chance in hell. We’ve done this plenty of times. We know what we’re doing.”

  “I’m not gonna fuck it up, but I’m not going to wait much longer, either. It’s dark outside. Let me go out on my own, reconnoiter the place, and find a good location to set the explosives. I can move freely without causing any alarm. I speak the language. I know the customs around here. Like you said, we’ve got to get most of Soquet’s guards out at the wall before we go in or they’ll flank us when we get inside the chateau.”

  “Okay, we’ll go out tonight for recon and make sure the place is set up the way the satellite image indicates. Maybe we can see how many men he’s got at the wall.”

  “Black and Claire might already be in bad shape. We might have to carry them out.”

  The other two guys frowned, but they nodded in agreement. Novak knew by the looks on their faces that they were extremely concerned, too. This whole plan was suspect, not enough thought, not enough men, not enough time, but it could work. Especially if Booker and Holliday were as good as Novak believed they were, and they were. They would probably succeed getting inside without detection. Getting everybody back out alive? Well, that was another story altogether.

  Little Boy Lost

  Rico got down and crawled on his belly through the thick, thorny bushes growing along the back wall of his mama’s vegetable garden. The thorns kept scratching him, but he didn’t care. When he got to the break in the wall where the bricks had fallen off, he could look into the courtyard, and he stayed down low and watched the big guards standing around with their long rifles slung over their shoulders. There were a lot of them, and they leaned against the wall at various places and talked together and smoked lots of cigarettes, just like they always did.

  But he was trying to see that girl named Claire. She told him that everything was going to be all right, but he wasn’t so sure about that. She didn’t know what Jaxy and Max were like. How they liked to just kill people, anytime they wanted to, and nobody ever did anything about it. Sometimes they just up and killed one of their own men, too. Shot them down for no reason. And both of them were already angry at Claire for helping him get away.

  So he was really scared that they’d just take her up on that high cliff and shoot her in the head, the way they had his parents. His whole body began to shiver, because he was very afraid for her, and he couldn’t stop thinking about how Daddy and Mama had been thrown off the cliff, their bodies probably spinning around in the air, until they’d splashed down into the sea where it smashed so hard against the rocks very, very far below. He had been alone since that awful day, but now he felt like he had a friend, somebody who could get him away from Jaxy. That Claire lady had been
real nice and held him real tight and rocked him, just like his mama used to do. He wanted to be with her again. He wanted her to hold him like that again and take him far, far away from all the bad people. And he never, ever wanted to come back to this place by the sea, not ever again. He hated it now. He hated everything about it.

  For a long time, Rico lay in the dark and searched the courtyard for Jaxy. He did not want to run into her on his way inside the fortress. She would beat him with her sap and make him do tricks for the big men with the guns and they would all laugh at him. Then she would tie him to her bed when she went to sleep, and he would have to sit there on the cold, stone floor and wait for her to wake up, unable to move very far on the short leash or even go to the bathroom.

  Right now, though, he was free, and he knew places that the bad ones didn’t even know about, places where they would never find him, secret places where he could hide Claire, too. He used to love all his daddy’s stories about the Romans and the pirates, but now he just hated it, every inch of it, every room, even his own hideout. But he could find out where they were keeping Claire. He could watch from the little slits inside the tunnels. Some of them led all the way down to the lowest grotto overlooking the waves and others led out outside the walls into the trees. There were spaces between the walls, too, with lots of hidden doors. He would be safe there, if he could just get into the first tunnel without getting caught. The one named Claire had freed him, and now he had to free her, too.

  As the men turned and talked together about some soccer game being played in Rome, he moved stealthily along on the ground, still crawling low on his stomach, slithering out over the garden wall and elbow-crawling his way to the ancient covered cistern in the center of the courtyard. He could just barely lift the heavy lid high enough to slip inside. Then he eased down into the knee-deep water and waded as quietly as he could to where the narrow Roman trough ran under the courtyard and back into the main part of the house. Slowly, silently, he crawled along through the darkness and made it all the way to the Great Hall without even sloshing the water very much.

  When he finally reached the main level, he squatted down and trembled all over. He held his breath when he heard Jaxy’s voice floating out of the room right next to Rico’s hiding place. She was talking to Max. She was talking about Rico. She was saying she was going to catch him and make him sorry he’d run away again.

  Rico got really terrified then because she was so awfully mean and she was so close and because she hurt him so much when she shocked him with that dog collar. She would drag him around on the leash and laugh if it hurt so bad that he cried and then she would tell him to quit his blubbering and act like a man. He couldn’t help it. He hated her. He wasn’t supposed to ever hate anybody, his mama had told him so, but he hoped Jaxy fell off that high cliff and into the ocean and drowned and was taken far out to sea where a whale would eat her like one that had eaten Jonah.

  But he didn’t move a muscle the whole time that they stood talking together inside the very next room. He hardly even breathed, and held himself so still, not until she and Max moved over to the wide main staircase and climbed up to the second floor where all the bedrooms were located. Then he waited some more, just to make sure none of the big guards were coming, and then he got down on his hands and knees and scurried the rest of the way down the shaft until he reached the narrow space between the walls where he could stand up and walk. He wanted to find Claire so bad. He wanted to tell her about the man she was looking for, the man who had picked him up and held him, just like she had, when his fancy red car had skidded to a stop and almost hit him. Maybe if Rico could take her to him, maybe then she and the blue-eyed man would take him away with them, somewhere safe, where there weren’t any bad ones that hurt him.

  Rico tiptoed up the narrow stone steps behind the wall that rose beside the staircase, up to the second floor, where he used to have his own bedroom, where his mama used to come wearing her white and pink nightgown that was all covered with little rosebuds and read books to him before she kissed him good night and turned off the light. He wished she could still do that. He wished she wasn’t floating under the water, dead, with fish all around her. He wished she could kiss him good night again. Tears burned behind his eyes, but he didn’t cry. He had stopped crying for her a long time ago. And he also knew what would happen if Jaxy heard him. So he moved along inside the walls, as silent as a wraith floating above the ground.

  Chapter Ten

  Since Claire had been locked up inside the spacious bedroom, she had spent every moment searching for anything she could fashion into a weapon. So far she had found nothing, but she had come across a locked drawer in the bedside table. She had spent some time trying to force it open, fairly certain that she would find something useful inside. On the other hand, maybe they wanted her to open the drawer, maybe that was the plan. Maybe one of Soquet’s little specialty grenade bombs was tucked inside, triggered to go off when she pulled the drawer open. She knew full well that they liked to do awful stuff like that, play tricks on their victims.

  Forewarned of their habits, Claire gave up on forcing the drawer for the moment and methodically tossed the room and the bathroom. She was desperate for a weapon, any kind, anything she could use to defend herself, because she knew she was going to have to. And soon. But they had been way too thorough. She found nothing. They had pretty much stripped the room of anything sharp and/or heavy.

  All the while she searched, the video camera’s red light kept up its rapid blinking, watching her every movement, waiting for her to do something. What? Open that damn drawer? But if doing that triggered a bomb, why would they have locked it? Why wouldn’t they just let her jerk it open and that would be the end of her, on tape for Black to watch. Or maybe they were waiting for something else to happen to her? Her gut told her that whatever it was, it involved a bomb. She was pretty sure they would kill her the same way Soquet’s wife had died and make Black watch it go down. She was also certain that Black would be forced to watch her blown-to-bits demise from whatever hellhole in which he was confined. So she had to get out and find him before they got her. She only hoped she had enough time.

  At one point, she dragged the chair over to the camera and stood up on the seat, intending to pull the camera off the wall. Doing that probably wouldn’t help her get out alive, but maybe she could force off one of the metal brackets for a weapon. But the ceilings in the ancient chateau, or whatever the hell it was, were way too high for her to reach. She didn’t have a chance in hell of pulling it down. She checked the lamps beside the bed for a lightbulb, but both had been removed. She could slam the lamp base into an assailant, if worse came to worst. It was fairly heavy, but that heft also made it hard to wield against anybody who was quick. Unless she took them by surprise, which was a possibility.

  She felt along the floor for loose boards and slid her hands along the empty bookcases and grates, searching for hinges, hoping to find hidden passages or doors. Lots of old houses had them, especially in Europe. She found nothing. She was trapped inside that room, with a bomb now possibly ticking down inside that drawer, and no way out.

  Claire was exhausted. She hadn’t slept much in the last four days. Just short, fitful dozes before all the worry and the living nightmare they were stuck inside woke her to stark reality. She was hungry, too. She was thirsty. She was anxious. Her hands were shaking with nerves so she gripped them together and took a deep breath. And she was impatient, because Booker and Novak and Holliday should have struck by now. They should have been there, attacking the Soquets. Something had gone wrong, that’s what her gut was telling her, but she hoped she was wrong. Or they could’ve been made by Soquet’s men, and all three of them could be lying dead somewhere or floating facedown in the ocean, where it boiled and crashed far below her window.

  Claire forced those panicky thoughts out of her head, because they were self-defeating and because she couldn’t let herself think about being left alone there to get Black out
. She didn’t want to believe that she and Black were unarmed and on their own with this band of sickos, with no possible chance of rescue. No, she wouldn’t believe that. Booker and the guys would come. She just had to be patient. Wait for them to come in, most likely under the cover of night. It would happen soon. It had to happen soon. Tomorrow at the very latest. They just had to make it through the night, and so far Marcel Soquet hadn’t seemed to be rushing into any deadly action.

  Moving back to the tiny bathroom, she splashed cold water on her face and then cupped her hands under the spigot and drank for a long time. She was just so weary, probably about as worn down as she had ever been in her life. She needed sleep, because her mind was growing cloudy with fear and nerves and the ever lurking despair. For a moment, she just stood there, staring dully at her face in the small mirror set into the wall, trying to think what she should do next. Then she realized with a giant leap in her pulse that she did have an option. She quickly examined every inch of the bathroom for cameras or peepholes and found nothing. Nobody appeared to be watching her there.

  Then she pulled off her black T-shirt, wrapped it around her right hand, and slammed her fist into the mirror as hard as she could. The slivered glass didn’t shatter, but it cracked big-time, into large jagged pieces running down its length. Big, sharp, deadly pieces of glass with which she could stab somebody. She quickly slipped the shirt back over her head and tried to pry out the longest piece with her fingernails. It didn’t want to dislodge, and she cut the tip of her forefinger trying to get under it. It was sharp enough to kill all right. She finally got it out of the frame and examined it as a possible weapon. It was about eight inches long, broken to a sharp jagged point at one end but squared off to about two inches across the bottom. Very much like a dagger. Oh, yeah, it could be lethal all right.