by Linda Ladd
“Pick up, pick up, damn it, Novak, pick it up!” she ground out through clenched teeth. This was their best hope: that Booker and his team were nearby and could help them get out. But Novak didn’t pick up. His automated voice mail came on, and she hissed out the coordinates of her location and told him to get there in a hurry, that she couldn’t get Black out without them.
Claire hung up, called again and got his voice mail once more. She left another message and then she texted her GPS location to his phone, just in case the voice mail didn’t activate. Then she tried Booker’s and Holliday’s numbers. Neither of them answered and her hopes fell. What if they were all dead? What if they had been discovered and killed before they could attempt their rescue? Maybe that’s why they hadn’t shown up. Oh, God, they weren’t gonna make it out without them.
Awful waves of dread rammed through her then, so she inhaled some more of the warm sea breeze sweeping in off the sea. Deep, bracing breaths, while she tried her best to calm down. Then she turned and knelt down and drank deeply of the freshwater and felt a little revived. She splashed cold water on her face and head with her good hand and scrubbed the gore off her face and neck and out of her hair as best she could. After that, she stood up, ready to go again.
Okay, first off, she had to leave the phone on, in case they got the message and tried to call back. More importantly, she had to get to Black, get him inside the tunnels where he would be safe. She checked the Glock again, checked the mag, made sure the knife was in the scabbard at her waist. She put the phone back in her bra on vibrate and hoped she’d keep getting a signal. She turned to the brave little boy who now held her life in his hands.
“Okay, c’mon, Rico, time to go get Black out of that room.”
Chapter Sixteen
They made it back to the safe house without a problem, and Novak was pretty sure nobody was in pursuit. John Booker had regained consciousness. He was cognizant of what had gone down but was still woozy and light-headed. His speech was slurred, and he was in no way ready to fight anybody, not yet. Holliday had cleaned out his leg wound with Betadine the best he could, then wrapped it up tightly with gauze, and tossed back some painkillers with a bottle of whiskey that Black kept at the safe house.
After a couple of hours of rest, Holliday would be back on his feet, but he would still be in a lot of pain and have a limp. Right now, he appeared on edge, nervous, and angry, but he wanted to move out. Sooner, rather than later. His face was set with utter purpose. Booker was slowly getting there, too. The shrapnel wounds he’d suffered were mostly superficial, thanks to the Kevlar vest and helmet. Both were battling severe headaches from being so close to the explosive device and that wasn’t going away any time soon. The fact that they’d both hit the floor facedown had probably saved their lives—that and their assault gear.
Surprisingly, other than the same intense thudding, relentless headache, Novak was unharmed for the most part. He had minor shrapnel wounds and a sore back but nothing serious. Once they were safely inside the farmhouse, he pulled out his phone, ready to bring in help from Paris. He wanted to know where the Grenadier had last been surveilled by French police, and he knew he had to find out the man’s location fast. They had to get a bead on all of Soquet’s known properties and places that he was known to frequent. He switched on the phone and immediately found the one missed message alert. The call had come from Max Soquet. What the hell? He swiped it on at once, fearing the worst. “Got a call from Soquet’s kid. The boy, Max. They must wanna make a trade.”
The other two men jumped up and gathered around him, and Novak put the phone on speaker. Whether an offer to trade or not, this was not a good sign. At all. If they knew about Novak, who was not even part of Black’s covert team, if they knew his personal number, Claire had been forced to tell them in ways he didn’t want to think about. If that were so, all of them were in big trouble. No trade or deal Soquet wanted to make would be to Claire and Black’s advantage. But when the panicked voice came on, they all realized at once that it wasn’t Max Soquet who had called him. It was Claire Morgan, and she sounded scared, desperate, and uncharacteristically frantic in a way that none of them had ever heard from her before.
Claire was giving specific GPS coordinates, over and over, and then she started to cut out. “We’re here, come quick … I’m … hiding. They got Black … drugged … Max’s dead … hurry, hurry.” And then the phone died and her voice was gone.
Novak immediately tried to call her back, and John Booker was already typing the GPS coordinates into his laptop. The call didn’t go through so they all waited for the map to pop up on the monitor. When it did, Booker stared at the screen and then looked at them, his face shocked. “Oh, my God, they’re not in France. They’re in Sicily.”
“Where in Sicily?” Novak said quickly.
“Looks like a small island, maybe, just off the coast, west of Marsala. It’s close to some bigger islands. Looks tiny so it could be privately owned. There’s no name given on this map.”
“How far is that from here?” asked Jack.
Novak stood up quickly. “That’s the Aeolian Islands. I’ve been there a couple of times. Probably somewhere around the island of Milazzo, or Lipari, maybe. Pinpoint the GPS on that phone and we can get there by plane in an hour, hour and a half tops.”
After that, nothing else was said. They scrambled to collect their gear and headed back to the plane. The whole time Novak berated himself for the way they’d been played, the way they had walked right into Marcel Soquet’s bloody, terrorist hands. And he was worried now, really worried, because he didn’t think they had a snowball’s chance in hell to get Claire and Black out alive. It would take almost two hours before they could land on an airport in the Marsala area, figure out which island they sought, and get out there on a boat.
Until then, Claire would have to survive and get Black out on her own. Somehow she’d have to keep both of them alive and uninjured. And that was asking a lot. On the other hand, he knew Claire Morgan pretty well by now. She was a fighter, no question about it. She’d proven it more than once. If she could just hold on for a few more hours, they all might just get lucky. He hoped to God that would be the outcome of their stupid and gargantuan mistake, but he sure as hell couldn’t count on it.
Chapter Seventeen
Trying to tamp down her growing impatience, Claire trailed Rico through endless and intricately designed tunnels and up and down narrow stone steps lined with peepholes and air vents and hidden doors. They were moving fast now, almost jogging, but still the place was absolutely huge at the subterranean level, lots of it with nothing left now but crumbling ruins filled with fallen rocks and standing water. They passed empty chambers on the other side of the wall, one after another, some with no roof and only partial walls.
Claire could tell that Rico had spent lots of time exploring the dusky shafts. He led her with easy confidence up and down the serpentine stone paths, so far-reaching and convoluted that she became hopelessly turned around. It was like navigating the catacombs of Rome or Paris, or the New York City sewer system. But they were going to get Black out. Today. Now. In a matter of minutes. Her hand was throbbing; it felt burning hot now, the pain simply agonizing, the tight bandage making it worse. She tried not to think about it. She had to keep going.
Rico was small and flexible, and he crawled and scampered ahead of her, as if he knew this was his only chance at freedom from the terrible Jaxy. He acted almost happy again, more like a normal child and not the dirty urchin with street smarts and dark bruises around his neck. Now that she was deep inside his secret labyrinth with him, he felt safe and seemed more in his element. The truth was, though, and Claire knew it only too well, Rico was just a frightened little boy who missed his parents, a kid who had been terribly mistreated, abused in ways that Claire couldn’t let herself think about. She was going to save him from all that. No matter what it took or how long it took. She was not going to allow him to be taken again by those cruel, i
nhuman beasts.
As they moved along, Claire kept listening for the sound of men running outside in the halls of the main living quarters, but it was impossible to hear much of anything through the thick walls. As far as she could ascertain, the mansion lay around them now, silent as a grave and seemingly deserted. There was no outcry about her escape or Max’s death and that was the only thing keeping them alive at the moment. Once they found that the mangled body was not her but Max, the alarm would go off quickly enough. They had to get to Black before that happened.
Claire began to think they would never make it to that awful white room. But then, finally, they climbed one last narrow stone stairway, a passage so narrow that her shoulders barely fit through. Then they were there, Rico squatting down and pointing to the low opening that would take her down to Black’s prison. She could hear some kind of music blaring somewhere at the other end, very loud and raucous. Sounded like a heavy metal band, maybe. She couldn’t name the song, but the beat was loud and hammering and created havoc in her ears. She bent over and looked down through the dark tunnel. “I don’t see any light at the end,” she said, looking back at Rico.
“They keep him locked up in the dark a lot.”
Claire swallowed down another wave of rage, not letting herself imagine the things Black had suffered. She couldn’t; she just couldn’t. “You stay here, Rico, don’t you move, okay? Don’t go anywhere. If anything happens to me, if you hear gunshots, if they kill me and Black, I want you to run. You hear me, Rico, you run as fast as you can and you hide someplace where they’ll never find you. They’ll kill you if you don’t. If our friends come, some big guys, three of them, they’ll save you. They’ll take you out of here. Understand me, baby?”
The little boy’s face had grown very sober. He nodded. Claire kept the knife in her hand but stuck the Glock inside the jacket pocket. She got down on all fours and slowly crawled down the length of the passage, clearing the way in the pitch blackness around her with her throbbing right hand. It was very cold inside and pitch black. Something had to be blocking the grate from inside the room, unlike the other tunnels she’d been inside. When she reached the end and touched the brass grate, she realized there was some kind of padded fabric covering it inside the room. She felt around until she found the corner where Rico had pulled the fabric up from the tacks that held it to a board on the floor. She folded it back a tiny bit and peered through the grille.
Inside, the room looked like a mind-boggling, psychedelic nightmare. A strobe light was flashing black and white patterns all over the walls and ceiling and floor, on and off, in and out and bouncing around, all kinds of swirls and whorls and jagged lines. Then the strobe light would morph into red or yellow or purple. It made her eyes ache just looking at it, made her feel dizzy. She knew it was meant to confuse Black and disorient him even more than he already was. Then she saw him. Her heart sped up. He was no longer tied to the chair, thank God. But he was definitely out of his head. His face was dark, heavy with black whiskers and bruises; his clothes were dirty and disheveled and stained with blood. He was staggering around the room, and she was pretty sure that he didn’t know where he was. His hands were stretched out in front of him, swiping the air, as if he were clearing away invisible spiderwebs. She couldn’t hear him well because of the raucous music, but she could see that he was muttering and cursing and maybe calling out her name. Oh, God, he was tripping hard, way out of it, inside the worst kind of bad acid trip. That meant he could probably do nothing to help her get him out of his prison.
Once she made sure that he was alone inside the room, she unlatched the metal lever on the old grate and pushed it out a little. She kept her weapon in her hand while she inched her head out a degree and searched the room for cameras. The strobe effect of the lights made it hard to find them. But she finally saw the tiny red light blinking and realized there was only one camera, and it was bolted in the middle of the wall facing the chair and affixed over a wall of big television screens. They were still filming him, and she could not let them see her. She had to avoid camera range at all costs. Black was still stumbling around, bumping into the walls, totally and completely out of his mind. She eased herself outside the vent, keeping low and pressed back against the wall directly under the camera where they couldn’t detect her. When he finally wandered close enough, Claire called out his name very softly and hoped to God that Black could hear her over the blare of the music.
“Black, look, it’s me. You gotta come over here. Please, Black. Come over here. Quick. You’ve got to.”
Black didn’t seem to hear her, and she knew that the drug, probably LSD or PCP, something extremely strong and hallucinogenic, for sure, had him so deep in its grip that he was way beyond any degree of rational thought. She was gonna have to force him to come with her, force him into the tunnels, and force him to stay quiet. But he was muttering and confused and disoriented, and she wasn’t sure she could silence his ramblings, not while he was in such a delirious state. She watched him amble around for a moment. He stopped in his tracks and covered his ears with his hands and yelled out something that she couldn’t understand. Then he staggered around some more and got down on his hands and knees, hands sliding over the tiled floor, as if he was looking for something he’d dropped.
Slowly, still alert to the camera above her and hoping it didn’t pan the room periodically, Claire got out the gun and edged closer to him. She was almost directly in front of him when he finally saw her. He stared blankly at her a second, trying to focus, squinting in confusion, and then he started backing away, his palms out in front of him as if to fend her off. “No, no, you’re dead, you’re dead, oh, God, you’re dead.”
“Listen, Black, listen to me. Come here. I’m not dead. I’m here. I can’t come out there to you. You’ve got to come over here, or they’ll see me.” She hissed it out, watching the camera.
“You’re dead, you’re dead,” he kept mumbling over and over, but he was staring hard at her, frowning, trying to understand what she was saying.
“Damn it, Black, I’m not dead! I’m right here! Get over here now!”
“Claire is dead,” he said again, his voice hoarse and cracking on the words. He kept shaking his head, attempting to clear his muddied vision. She could see that his pupils were huge and dark and dilated, his eyes appearing almost completely black, and he was so heavily drugged up that she wasn’t sure she could reason with him. She felt despair rise up inside her, but she kept trying, almost wheedling now, watching the door, terrified a guard would burst in any moment and shoot them both.
Claire gripped the gun tighter, kept it ready to fire, but finally Black staggered over in her direction, still clearing away something inside his wild drug-induced dreams. When he got close enough, she grabbed the front of his shirt and jerked him down onto his knees in front of her. He tried to pull back, but she clutched him too tightly. Then he stopped trying to get away and stared at her and frowned and shook his head.
Claire put her mouth up close against his ear. “Black, it’s me. It’s Claire. I swear it’s me. I’m alive. I’m here to get you out. C’mon, we gotta go. You’ve gotta be quiet. Understand me? You gotta do what I say. I’m gettin’ you out of here, but you have to be quiet.”
Black stopped moving then, and his body grew completely still as he stared into her face, his eyes so dark and vacant that Claire could barely stand it. She kept watching the door and tried to pull him back toward the open grate. When they were nearly there, the music suddenly stopped right in the middle of a song, the strobe lights went off, and the room became pitch black and quiet. Then the overhead lights came on, blinding in their intensity. Oh, God, they were coming in. They were coming for him!
Claire pushed Black down and forced him headfirst into the narrow shaft, as best she could, and then she scrambled in after him and pulled the latch closed and locked it in place and pulled the white fabric down. Guards were outside in the room now, yelling the alarm and searching for Black. Bla
ck heard them, stiffened all over, and then he started struggling to break her grip. Scared they would hear him, Claire pulled his head up against her and pushed his face hard into her breasts, both her arms held tight around his head, muffling his confused ramblings against her body.
She put her mouth down close to his ear, her words so low that they were barely audible. “Hush, hush, please, Black, please, be quiet, be still, or they’ll find us. It’s me. It’s really me. I’m getting you out of here. Ssh, ssh, it’s okay now. I got you. Just calm down, I’m here. It’s gonna be all right now. Just be still. Please, Black, just be still a little longer.”
Black suddenly seemed to hear her and lay still, thank God, as if he was trying to listen to her desperate whispers, and then he seemed to just sink down into some kind of deep dream state. He had his arms around her now, too, clutching her tightly against him, his grip so strong and squeezing her hard enough to hurt, but she didn’t move a muscle. She kept breathing the soothing words into his ear, holding him securely against her body, stroking his hair, but inside she was so terrified the men would find the vent that her muscles were knotted and jumping. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to move fast enough if they did find the vent.
Moments later, the commotion outside in the white room went quiet, and the men’s cries faded as they ran back out into the hall, searching for Black, no doubt trying to figure out how he had escaped. She still waited, almost afraid to move, but then she knew she had to get farther away from that awful white room. She tugged and jerked on Black’s shirt, pulling him back up the shaft after her as best she could with a man so big. He helped some, and she was finally able to drag him out to where Rico sat waiting. Rico backed away, no doubt scared at the way Black looked and the bizarre way he was acting.
Once she got Black out in the tall passage, she sat on the floor with him and held his back up against her chest and kept both her hands clamped tightly over his mouth. He was rambling incoherently and had blood all over his face, both from his mistreatment and from the bloody bandage wrapped around her hand. She gentled her voice even more and told him over and over that he had to be quiet, that he couldn’t talk, and he got quiet again, lying inert against her with his eyes closed.