Janie wondered what it was, because she’d never heard that kind of noise coming from under Mommy’s car before. But it was hard to concentrate because she was really, really tired and her head was pounding and her tummy felt queasy, like the time she’d taken a big gulp of her mommy’s soda before realizing it was a grown-up drink, and not a soda at all.
She tried to remember the last time she’d woken up feeling this sick and couldn’t do it.
So she kept her eyes closed because the darkness helped make her headache feel a little better. She listened to the oddly comforting sound of the spring or the shock absorber, or whatever metallic thingie was making that squeaking noise under the car, and concentrated on not puking.
She wondered where Mommy was taking her. They were definitely on a highway. The sensation of speed irritated her upset tummy, although the hum of tires on pavement was almost as soothing as the squeaking noise.
She opened her mouth to ask Mommy where they were going when she remembered.
She remembered everything.
She’d been walking home from school with the usual group of kids. One by one her friends had left to go into their houses and eventually the group was whittled down to just Janie and her best friend Samantha Stewart.
Janie said goodbye to Sam, and as she turned toward her house she saw a big blue car idling on the side of the road halfway between the Stewart’s driveway and hers. She remembered thinking it was an odd sight. She’d never seen the car before. It didn’t belong to anyone in the neighborhood.
And why was it just sitting there on the side of the road?
As she got closer, she remembered thinking maybe she should cross to the other side of the road. The car was making her a little nervous. But before she could do it, the car’s door had opened and a man got out and then she would have felt weird crossing the road because the man would have known she was afraid of him and he probably would have felt bad.
So she kept walking and as she did, she became a little less afraid and a little more curious. The man was holding a camera. It wasn’t working right, she could tell, because as he held it to his face he was messing around with the lens.
He walked forward, aiming the camera at something behind her as she approached, and for a second she thought they were going to collide because he was concentrating so hard on the stupid camera he didn’t even seem to notice she was there. She remembered stepping to the side to go around him.
That was when things got hazy.
She had a vague, milky recollection, kind of a fuzzy black-and-white memory, of a cloth being stuck in her face. The cloth was oily and smelly, worse than just about anything she had ever encountered, and that was where the memories stopped until she woke up a couple of minutes ago with the awful headache.
The squeaking noise was still coming from under the car, but it was no longer soothing or comforting. All Janie could think about was how she’d never heard that noise—or any noise even remotely like it—coming from Mommy’s car. And she had ridden in Mommy’s car a lot.
That fact, combined with the memory of the man sticking the stinky cloth into her face, made her scared.
What if she wasn’t in Mommy’s car at all?
What if she was in…that weird camera guy’s car?
She still hadn’t opened her eyes because her headache continued to pound. But now she wanted to keep her eyes closed for a second reason: maybe if she did so she would fall back to sleep.
And if she fell back to sleep, maybe she would then wake up in her own bed and this would all just be a really bad, really scary dream. Or even if she didn’t wake up in her bed, maybe she would awaken in Mommy’s car. That would be almost as good.
But she didn’t think that was going to happen, mostly because now that she remembered what had happened with the camera guy she knew there was no way in the world she’d ever be able to get back to sleep.
She took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, just like Mommy had taught her to do when she was little and was learning how not to have tantrums when she got upset. Mommy called it “learning how to behave like an adult.”
So Janie breathed in and blew out and when she finished she still didn’t feel much like an adult. She tried again and the only thing that changed was she felt really dizzy. Her mouth still tasted nasty thanks to the gross cloth the camera guy had stuck in her face, and her throat felt slick and yucky, like she’d drank a glassful of cooking oil or something.
“Mommy?” She spoke softly, in a voice that was almost a whisper.
She wanted her mommy to answer more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life, even more than she had wanted an American Girl doll for Christmas last year, and that was practically all she’d thought about from Thanksgiving until Christmas morning.
She held her breath, half hopeful and half terrified, waiting to see what would happen.
Nothing happened.
Either she was being ignored or she had spoken too softly to be heard. That squeaky spring seemed to be getting louder, but maybe it was just Janie’s imagination. Mommy always said she had a great imagination, so that was probably it.
One more deep breath. In and out. She still felt a lot more like a kid than an adult. A scared little kid.
She raised her voice and tried again. “Mommy?”
It sounded shaky and still weak, like it belonged to somebody else.
“Your mommy’s not here. She asked me to take care of you for a while.” The voice came from right next to her and even though she’d been expecting an answer she jumped. It was definitely not Mommy’s voice. It sounded exactly like a voice that might belong to a weird camera guy who would stick a yucky cloth in a girl’s face.
“Sh-She did?” That didn’t sound like something Mommy would do, but would an adult just lie to her face like that? She couldn’t imagine it.
“That’s right.”
“Then what’s the secret word?”
A long silence and then the voice said, “Excuse me?”
The man’s voice had changed. It was suddenly harder and sounded angry, and Janie didn’t know why. She was only doing what Mommy had always told her to do.
But now she was afraid to answer.
After another silence, this time on her end, the man said, “What are you talking about, kid?”
She screwed up her courage and answered. “You know, the secret word. Mommy always told me that if she ever had to send somebody to pick me up that I wasn’t expecting, she would tell them a special word to say so I would know it was safe to go with them.”
“She always told you that, huh?”
“Yes. So…”
“So what?”
“Um…so what’s the word?” Janie knew Mommy would never forget to use the secret word, and there was no way in the world anyone would ever be able to guess it. She had owned a pet hamster for a while named Fluffy. Fluffy had eventually gotten sick and died, but Janie still thought about her every day. Mommy and Janie had agreed “Fluffy” would make the perfect secret word.
The man didn’t say “Fluffy.”
He didn’t say anything.
Then he laughed, and for some reason that was worse than when he’d sounded angry. “Secret word, huh? Your mom’s pretty clever, I have to give her that.”
“So…what’s the word?”
“Jesus Christ kid, enough. I don’t know the goddamned secret word, okay? Just shut up and don’t give me any trouble or I’ll hit you with another dose of gas and then duct tape your mouth closed.”
Tear welled in Janie’s eyes and she finally opened them, blinking rapidly. The tears rolled down her cheeks as her head resumed pounding like the giant rolling drum she’d seen in last year’s Fourth of July parade, exactly as she’d known it would.
She should have kept her eyes closed. The weird camera guy was next to her, driving a car she didn’t recognize, and for the first time she realized her hands were tied together behind her back and her ankles had been secured as well. A heavy blanket covered
her from just under her chin all the way down to the floor. Anybody who happened to look inside the car’s window would see a resting kid, not a girl who’d been kidnapped and taken away from her mommy.
She sniffled and the man looked across the front seat, annoyed.
She was trying to be brave but it was really hard. Her lower lip quivered and her insides felt like jelly and now she was closer to throwing up than ever. It felt just like that time in first grade when she’d been forced to do Show and Tell in front of the whole class and she got so nervous she puked all over Fluffy’s cage.
That was a long time ago, way back in first grade. Now she was a third grader, a big kid, and everybody knew big kids didn’t hurl just because they were nervous or scared.
“Where’s my mommy?” The words came out almost before she even realized she’d spoken them. It was like they exploded out of her, like she couldn’t have held them back if she’d tried.
“I told you already.” The man seemed really mad again. “Your mommy wants me to watch you for a while. She said she’s tired of your act and wants some peace and quiet. So do I, now that I think about it, so shut your mouth like I told you before.”
She couldn’t stop the tears this time. She knew she should be brave and was trying to be, but the things the man said were scary and mean.
And they were lies.
Janie didn’t know where the weird camera guy was taking her but she knew he was lying about her mommy. Mommy told her every day how much she loved her, and she called her My Perfect Little Girl and said they could face anything provided they did it together. For a long time after Daddy left, Mommy had cried when she said it, but she had still made sure to say it every day, even though it made her sad.
Mommy would be looking for her; Janie knew she would. She had probably already started. And she would find her, too, and when she did the man driving the car would be really sorry. He had obviously never seen Mommy when she was really mad, or else he wouldn’t be acting so mean.
Janie knew she couldn’t stop crying so she tried to do it quietly. She consoled herself by imagining all the things Mommy would say to the man when she found him. She guessed some of the words would be Bad Words, the grown-up ones Janie wasn’t allowed to say.
Mommy tried not to say them either but sometimes she couldn’t help herself when she got really mad. Usually Janie didn’t like it when Mommy used those words, but she couldn’t wait for her to use them on the weird camera guy.
She smiled thinking about it. It was a trembly smile, and she still hadn’t quite stopped crying, but as long as she stayed quiet she didn’t think the man driving the car would tape her mouth shut like he’d threatened to do.
She didn’t want to find out for sure.
The man ignored her for now and kept driving, and that was just fine with Janie.
10
Jack’s computer was not a new model; in fact, it was ancient by the standards of modern electronics. The machine was at least a decade-and-a-half old, with a massive tower housing the hard drive. The tower was so big he kept it beside his desk. The speakers were large and clunky and the keyboard looked as though it had been trampled by a herd of elephants.
He’d thought for a long time about replacing the system, maybe with a laptop or even a tablet. But although he wouldn’t consider himself a technophobe, he didn’t much care about the digital revolution, either. He wasn’t one to spend valuable time online, and since the nature of his work was dependent upon secrecy, there would be little to gain—and a lot to lose—with an active presence on social media.
The only reason he even had a computer at all was because he needed it to access the encrypted email account The Organization had set up for him when he began working with Mr. Stanton.
This, though, as he sat waiting for the ancient machine to boot up, was one of the rare times he wished he’d upgraded. Edie was even now rushing to meet him. She was understandably upset and would be looking to him for answers, and until he could access the mysterious email she’d referenced from the kidnappers, he would have none to give.
His initial thought when Edie said Janie had been kidnapped was that her father had taken her. The vast majority of child abductions were directly related to custody issues between estranged parents, so that scenario would seem to make the most sense.
But he’d discarded that theory even before Edie mentioned the email. She’d made it abundantly clear to him over the course of numerous conversations that her greatest regret in life was her husband’s willingness to abandon his only child in order to move cross-country with a woman barely out of her teens.
“I could deal with him leaving me,” she’d said, her agony painfully clear, “but how could he run out on his own little girl?”
It seemed unlikely in the extreme that a man capable of what Edie’s ex had done would suddenly materialize out of nowhere, take Janie and then vanish again.
The fact that the email had been addressed to him made it abundantly clear that he was the reason little Janie Tolliver had been taken.
The sick feeling in his stomach clinched it. A man operating on the fringes of society—as Jack had been doing since his military days—learned to trust his instincts, and Jack’s were screaming that he was being targeted by Janie’s abduction.
The computer clicked and hummed and taunted him with the singular deliberateness with which it approached its mission. After what felt like half an hour but was probably only two or three minutes, its startup applications had launched and Jack hurriedly opened his web browser.
He navigated to his “normal” email account, the one through which he communicated electronically with everyone except The Organization. This would be the account the kidnappers would have had access to.
Finding the specific message was easy, even buried as it was among dozens of spam emails and routine correspondence. It stuck out like a sore thumb the moment Jack’s mailbox opened. It was the only one with a subject line reading, FUCK UP AND SHE DIES.
He closed his eyes.
Muttered, “Oh, Christ.”
Opened his eyes and then the email, and began reading.
We assume we now have your full attention, the message read. Please allow us to clarify something immediately, since a thorough understanding of the situation is critical to ensuring that everyone involved stays alive and healthy.
Thus, be warned: we are in charge, and you are not.
We recognize that such a scenario must irk a man of your…unique abilities, shall we say. But that is the situation, and that is how the situation will remain. We strongly suggest you come to grips quickly with this reality and accept the division of power in our relationship. Lives depend on it.
The little girl is fine for now, but she will remain so only as long as you do exactly as you are told. Deviate from your instructions in any way—even a minor way—and the lovely Ms. Tolliver will never see her child again. We are not men of patience, Mr. Sheridan, so do not underestimate our resolve unless you wish to explain to a grieving mother how you were responsible for her daughter’s death.
Having said that, please understand we are not unreasonable men. There is a way you can accomplish the return of Janie Tolliver to her mother’s loving arms. There is only one way, but it is eminently doable for a man of your…unique abilities.
And the way you can accomplish Janie’s return is this: you will assassinate Maryland Governor Jim Studds.
You will complete your assignment within seven days of the time and date stamped on this email.
You will make the governor’s death appear accidental.
Simple for a man of your…unique abilities, yes?
Be aware, Mr. Sheridan, that none of these conditions are negotiable. If you elect not to complete your assignment, or if you elect to inform the authorities of our arrangement, or if you take any action we deem suspicious or not in keeping with your assignment—and we will know—little Janie will die, and in the most, shall we say, DISAGREEABLE manner i
maginable.
It will not be pretty.
We told you earlier we are not unreasonable men. We will prove as much in a show of good faith soon. Stay by your telephone. We will call within the hour and allow Ms. Tolliver to speak to her child to establish proof of life.
But do not misinterpret our gesture of good faith as weakness. Make that mistake and neither you nor Ms. Tolliver will ever see her daughter or hear from us again.
The email was of course unsigned, and as he finished reading Jack realized he’d been holding his breath. He expelled it in an explosive burst punctuated with a curse. His worst fears had just been realized, and almost immediately after beginning his first real relationship in decades. He’d spent most of his adult life living a solitary existence out of a desire to avoid any possibility of placing a loved one in harm’s way, and now a defenseless child was in grave danger and her mother’s world had been shattered.
And it was all because of him.
He read through the email again, not sure what he was looking for other than some indication of its author’s identity. The sentence structure and phrasing suggested a level of education beyond what one would normally expect out of someone capable of kidnapping a child in order to coerce a man to commit murder.
Of course, any group committed to assassinating a sitting governor was probably far removed from the typical kidnapping-for-ransom scenario. And although Jack’s career had brought him in contact with plenty of people capable such a despicable act, none came immediately to mind as a suspect. Most of the people he’d encountered who possessed the sociopathic tendencies necessary to become involved in such a plot were no longer walking the earth.
The kidnapper could be someone he knew or it could be someone with whom he was completely unfamiliar.
He’d just begun examining the email for the third time when his front door opened and Edie Tolliver burst through it like a running back hitting the line in an NFL game.
He looked up and his heart broke. Edie wasn’t one to spend hours in front of a mirror putting herself together; she possessed a natural beauty that rendered any such effort unnecessary. But the distressed female standing in front of him barely resembled the beautiful young woman he’d come to know and begun to fall in love with.
Trigger Warning Page 5