She felt so upset she couldn’t finish her sentence.
“Are you going to tell me the truth?” he asked, calming down, readying himself for what awaited.
“I’m telling you the truth,” she replied, speaking slowly, looking at him uneasily.
“No, you’re telling me a lie. Those are two different things. You want to try for the truth now?”
She shook her head. “You’re… I have to go.”
She grabbed her bag from the table, readying herself to leave.
“Okay,” he said softly. “We’ll do it the hard way then.”
He swiftly pulled the chemical-doused cloth from behind the sofa pillow and held it to her face as she struggled to break free, clawing at his face, drawing blood. He slapped her and held her tighter until she lay loose in his arms, down and out for the count.
Of course, this time the man in the grey suit did it right. This wasn’t another restaurant debacle. Oh no. He had years to learn the intricacies of a well-laid plan, and he put them to good use.
The drive to the yacht club proved to be quiet and peaceful, and the man in the grey suit found himself humming softly to himself. He always found himself in this kind of mood when he taking a more hands-on approach to things, he realized.
The place was dead quiet when he arrived, something he already knew after doing his homework the week before. The locked gate presented no problem for him. He’d made a key, which he promptly placed in the lock, opening the gates wide. He got back in the car and drove to the private berth where he kept his yacht, a gift from a man who had not been very forthcoming with information, and then had suddenly become very generous with both information and possessions. He’d gracefully accepted the offer. And then he took care of the guy in the way only he could. The man in the grey suit did not enjoy loose ends.
He then popped the trunk and picked up his girlfriend, still unconscious. Fuck, she weighed a ton, surprising for someone so petite. True what they said about dead weight. Well, he was counting on it.
He boarded his yacht and placed the girl where she needed to be, then poured himself a vodka from a bottle he’d placed on the table beside him a few nights before, especially for tonight.
He looked at the glass, wondering if he had time to get some ice for it before the bitch woke up, and decided he didn’t want to miss the look on her face.
He wanted to see, and he wouldn’t let a few blocks of ice mess it up.
So he sat there in the darkness of night, glass in hand, and watched her sleep, thinking of the unfolding drama ahead. The old tingling sensation returned. Heightened senses.
The girl awoke, groggy and disorientated, lying on a large sheet of black plastic. As the world swum into focus she found herself looking up at a clear starry sky, the gentle rocking she felt telling her she had to be on a boat of some sort. Her parents were wealthy, and she knew the feeling of being on open water very well. She’d been sailing since childhood.
She tried to move but realized he had bound her hand and foot. Her heart began to beat faster, and she strained to break free, but to no avail. He had bound her with duct tape, with no way for her to wrestle or wriggle her way to freedom.
She didn’t get the chance to find out since the man in the grey suit’s face came into view, hovering just above hers.
“Sleep well, honey?” he asked with a cold glint in his eyes.
“Where the hell am I?” she managed. Her throat was parched, and she realized she could barely speak. “I need water.”
“It’s one of the side effects of the drug I administered,” the man in the grey suit replied. “Drink this.”
He poured water from a canister into her mouth, and she swallowed gratefully, feeling her throat calm with each passing second. He pulled it away from her and placed it out of her line of vision.
“Better?” he asked, looking at her through eyes devoid of emotion.
“What’s… what’s going on?” she asked, and there was real fear in her voice.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Just having a little chat,” the man in the grey suit replied, sitting down on a bench beside her.
“Just a nice little talk out here on the romantic seas.”
“Romantic? Are you fucking mad?”
“Fine,” he replied. “How about we cut to the chase? I asked you a question earlier,” the man in the grey suit said. “And you didn’t reply in the manner in which I had hoped you would.”
She shifted around in her desperation to break free. “What question?”
“How was the movie?” the man replied with a fabricated calmness. “The movie you saw with that guy while you were supposed to be on your way to your parents’ house.”
“I never went to see any fucking movie,” she screamed, desperate for him to believe her. Her voice dropped to a whisper “I didn’t see a movie, I swear. I don’t know who you saw, but it wasn’t me.”
“Okay,” the man in the grey suit replied. “So that’s how you want to play it.”
He pulled an old fashioned razor from his pants pocket, flicked it open.
And this time her voice quavered with fear.
“Please, no…”
“Something to help you to remember,” he replied with a smile which didn’t reach his eyes. He took her forefinger in his hand, slid the blade between flesh and nail, and looked at her. “Anything coming back to you yet?”
She started panicking, struggling to get free of the nightmare.
“Let me go, please,” she said then. “Please, I would never do anything to hurt you. I never saw a movie-”
The scream went on for a long time, blood spattering his hands as the nail came away from her finger and fell to the black plastic sheet.
“One,” the man in the grey suit said calmly. “There’re nine more. And I’ve only started with your hands.”
“Please,” she said again, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’ll say it if that’s what you want. I’ll say it.”
“You’ll say what? What will you say?” His voice rising in pitch.
“I’ll say whatever you want, just please don’t hurt me. Please.”
He took the next finger, her dialling finger in his hand and slid the blade into place again. “I want to hear the truth, that’s all.”
“I’m telling you the truth-”
The blade took off the second finger nail, and the screams returned.
He sat there, waiting for the screaming to stop. Eventually it did, her screams became moans, and the struggling became the shaking associated with shock.
“I can do this all night,” the man in the grey suit said. “And honestly I wouldn’t mind at all.”
She must have realized that only one way out of this existed, because she finally said, “The movie… I enjoyed the movie.”
The man in the grey suit looked at her for a long time.
“Please,” she continued. “I’ve said it. Please let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
“You know,” he replied, still holding the razor. “If you’d been honest with me from the start, it would never have come to this.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied, crying openly now. “I’m so sorry.”
“So who was he?”
“Who?”
“The guy you went to the fucking movie with!” the man in the grey suit yelled. “Who is he?”
She didn’t know what to say.
“He’s my cousin,” she tried.
“Like fuck he is, you cheating little bitch.” The razor blade flashed across her throat.
Her head lolled about, a guttural sound escaping from her exposed throat, a gaping hole spewing blood.
He watched as she became weaker and weaker, the light of life eventually leaving her eyes. Then he wrapped her in the black sheet, tied it all together, weighed it down with heavy chains that he’d bought for just this occasion, and turfed her body over the side of the yacht.
He sighed as he wiped the blade clean with a p
iece of rag.
If she had just been honest with him, which is all he wanted. Had she spoken the truth she would’ve finished her coffee back at his apartment and gone free.
No, he thought.
No, he would’ve killed her anyway.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The knock on our suite door came a little after six the evening, and I jumped up and opened it to let in an incredibly excited Mel, grasping the laptop as if it were made of solid gold. Shelley and I enjoyed lunch with him at midday and he’d been a bit glum, having not found anything that could help us find Rachel and beginning to beat himself up about it.
We’d tried to calm him, ease his mind a bit, saying that nobody could ask for more. Moreover, Shelley started feeling increasingly distraught, even though she tried her best not to show it. She needed her little girl back. Our little girl.
So we’d had a quick lunch, no languishing in the sun this time, and Mel had shot back up to his room to continue the search for the one little thing which would lead us to Rachel.
“Good news, I’m guessing?” I said, watching in amusement, and a fair whack of hope, as he came skipping past me like he was a rather manly, two days unshaven Fairy Godmother.
“Possibly,” he replied, sitting on the bed and opening the laptop. “This, for a start.”
He pointed at the screen.
I looked at it. “That’s his email account.”
“Yes it is,” Mel replied with a grin. “Well spotted, Tom. You should do this for a living.”
“Oh really?” I replied, eyebrow raised. “Very good. But no, thanks. One smartass techie is just about enough for this little party, don’t you think?”
“Yes, as it turns out, it is,” he said. “The account isn’t on his computer, or any PC in his house. The guy in the suit would have had no knowledge of its existence.”
“But he can trace Don’s online activities-” I began.
“Let’s see where Mel’s going here, Tom,” Shelley interrupted, but not unkindly.
“I’m just saying. Didn’t that Division9 scumbag go through it already?” I asked. “I mean, that’s the first sort of thing to check, right? The guy’s looking for him too, and he has the same significant resources we do, so-”
“Shut up, Tom,” Shelley, her voice filled with gentle reproach. “And let the guy say his piece, okay?”
“Sure,” I mumbled.
“It’s an email account on the Darknet,” Mel said. “It’s offline at the moment, with the page still open. And Mel’s right. The guy in the suit would have picked up on this, except he didn’t have the link from Don’s normal email account to this one.”
“Wait,” Shelley said. “The guy in the suit is running surveillance on Don, Right?”
“Yes,” Mel said. “He is.”
“So can’t he trace this email account too since we have access to it now? I mean if he’s watching Don’s regular email account…”
Mel shook his head. “Good luck tracking anything on the Darknet, sunshine. No, any activity he would have seen would have gotten scrambled as soon as I went in. And I was fast, pretty much downloaded everything on his Darknet account and jumping out before the guy in the suit would have even thought to install the software you need to get in there in the first place. We’re in the clear. Trust me.”
“The Darknet?” Shelley said, shaking her head in fascination, almost in disbelief. “What’s Don doing there? He doesn’t use drugs, or sell them to the best of my knowledge. I would have known. And he certainly isn’t into buying illegal firearms. I would have heard all about it.”
“People have secrets, Shel,” I said softly.
She shook her head, “No. I don’t believe I would have missed that kind of thing.”
“The Darknet isn’t only for buying illicit shit, Shel,” Mel continued. “It’s used for a number of reasons, most importantly security. If you type something into a search engine, you’re receiving results from about five percent of the internet.”
“The other nine-five percent is the Darknet,” I added. “Basically, if the internet as we know it is a slice, the Darknet is the whole damn pie.”
“It’s so big?” Shelley asked, astonishment written all over her face.
“Yup,” Mel continued. “The internet as we know it is just the tip of the iceberg, honey. The real action is down there in the rest of it, way below sea level. To stretch an analogy to breaking point.”
“Damn,” she said, quietly.
“Yes,” he said. “So like I said, there’s a lot more going on there than you may think. In Don’s case, it’s communication. The kind he doesn’t want available for scrutiny.”
“What type of communication?” I asked slowly, immediately assuming the worst, thanks to my SEAL training.
“The kind which involves leaving the country and taking your daughter along with you,” Mel replied. “Don’t worry, not the kind which arranges to drop a dirty bomb in the middle of LA, if you’re thinking along those lines.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” I replied.
“It’s a lot more than something, Tom,” Mel said. “It’s everything, man.”
“A dirty bomb in LA?” Shelley muttered. “Please, Don doesn’t have the balls or the commitment to pull off something like that, even if he wanted to. The idiot is all talk. He’s just a big, overgrown child with a small dick and too much family money.”
Mel and I laughed. The tension in the room evaporated in an instant. I have to admit, I felt comforted hearing about the size of his dick. Hell, anybody in my circumstances would be. It’s always good for a guy’s self-esteem to hear yours is bigger than his. Ok, she didn’t say that exactly, not in those words. But I identified with the sentiment. Or, at least, I thought so.
I shook my head, now attempting to get the image of Don’s tiny and dangling manhood out of my head, “Anyway, all talk of penises aside, let’s get to the matter at hand-”
They both burst into laughter, and I realized what I’d said a second later. And then I attempted to get the image of Don’s tiny and dangling manhood in my hand out of my head.
“Aargh!”
“Indeed,” Mel said, after he’d got his breath back. “Aargh is exactly right.”
“This is all amazing, Mel,” Shelley said, wiping her eyes with the palms of her hands. “And not to rain on your parade, but how the hell did you find this email account of Don’s if it wasn’t on the computer? How did you even know where to look?”
Mel smiled, “What I found did not exist on his computer, but it still resided in his normal email sent box, in the cloud. I just had to hack his account, which I did easily, that’s if you know what you’re doing.”
“Which you do,” I said with a grin.
“Which, as Tom has correctly stated, I do,” Mel confirmed with all the humility of a coked-up Wall Street trader in the middle of a threesome.
“But hang on,” I said.
“Yes?” Mel asked.
“Our guy in the suit didn’t think to look there?” I asked, my mind incredulous given the magnitude of such an omission.
“Seriously?”
“Oh I am a hundred percent sure he did look there,” Mel replied.
“In fact, the information he needed so very badly probably stared him right in the face. And smiled for the camera.”
“What?” Shelley said, becoming exasperated with the build-up and clearly wanting answers now. “What did you find that led you to the Darknet. What did this guy in the suit miss?”
“Don emailed a friend in Lebanon, an old friend of his, by the tone of the message, using his normal email account,” Mel said. “He spoke about how long ago they last saw each-other, and he said he was making plans to come on holiday, so that this friend of his could meet his lovely family. All very friendly and above board, except for the fact he made no mention of visiting his own family in Beirut, which I found a bit odd. No red flags for the man in the suit to get excited about. He even sent an at
tachment in the email. A picture of you and Rachel.”
Shelley frowned, “Don never mentioned anything about going to Beirut on holiday to me. It sounds like he was planning this for a while. What the hell? He’s a bastard, I found out pretty soon after I married the guy. But planning to steal my kid? What the hell?”
Mel shook his head, “He sent the message the same night you argued with him, Shelley. This doesn’t look like something he planned. He’s still a bastard, no doubts on that front, but the whole ‘planned kidnapping’ thing simply doesn’t appear to be the case. Like you said, a spoiled rich kid, throwing his toys out of the cot and running off with his favorite one. Rachel. Pardon the analogy.”
“Pardoned,” Shelley said. “But he’s going to pay for what he did, planned or not. I’ll make damn sure.”
“We all will, Shel,” Mel agreed. “And with great joy.”
“So,” I said, egging him on. “Tell us about this correspondence. How did it lead to anything useful? You mentioned a picture.”
“Yes,” Mel said. “So he sent his friend a picture. An image file that just so happened to be encrypted with a link to an email account on the Darknet.”
“Encrypted? A picture?” Shelley said, looking confused.
“Exactly,” Mel said. “The image file, the picture, contained a fairly basic encryption technology which allows you to hide information within a digital image.”
“Well, not exactly basic, Mel,” I said, but liking what I heard. “Your average end user couldn’t get their heads around that kind of thing.”
“No, they probably wouldn’t,” Mel replied. “But with the right incentive, something Don possessed in spades, it’s quite easy to download and use.”
“So you decrypted the image,” I said, nodding. “And then, what, hacked into his Darknet email account?”
“I never said it was easy,” Mel said. “I said I did it. I am good, Tom. Let’s just say the correspondence on the Darknet account revealed much. Don definitely enjoys the confidences of a sympathetic friend in Lebanon, somebody with anti-American sentiments and clearly intent on helping him get out of the country to hole up somewhere safe. I downloaded the correspondence from his Darknet account relating to this, and you can read through it later, if you like.”
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