His ears popped as the jet continued on its glide path back down to earth. The plane banked a couple of times as it followed a landing pattern around an airfield. Travis heard the whining sound of servos extending the flaps then a grinding noise and dull thud as the landing gear locked into place signaling they were on final approach. He shifted in his seat, preparing to brace himself for landing. A sound at his shoulder jerked his head up. Before he could open his mouth, someone jabbed a needle in his arm again. Within seconds the world started spinning and even the black fabric in front of his eyes faded into oblivion.
* * * * *
When he came to this time, two people dragged him by the arms over rough ground. His shoes bumped and scraped along the hard unyielding surface. Groggily, he tried to get his feet under him, but they wouldn’t cooperate. Sensing he was now conscious, whoever gripped his arms tightened their grasp, making his feeble struggles all but useless. The hood still covered his face, but Travis wasn’t sure it mattered. His head was so full of fuzz and the remnants of visions from the K-hole that he wouldn’t trust his eyes if he could see.
A few moments later, their pace slowed and the creak of rusted metal echoed around him. His captors dragged him a few more steps and stopped. He supported most of his own weight on weak and wobbly knees. Someone yanked the hood off his head as the grip on his arms loosened. An intense beam of light stabbed him in the face, and he squeezed his eyes to slits against the glare. Someone put a hand in the middle of his back and shoved him hard. Travis stumbled forward into the darkness and fell, banging one knee hard on the ground and skinning the palm of one hand.
He turned to face his kidnapers, but they’d already started back the way they’d come. The light from a large, high-beam flashlight illuminated some sort of tunnel and silhouetted three hulking figures walking away from him. Metal creaked again and clanged as one of them shut and locked a gate blocking the tunnel. The trio disappeared around a bend, and the light and sound of their footsteps faded until Travis was left in total darkness with only his breathing and thudding heartbeat for company.
He shook his head trying to clear out the cobwebs, and took stock. They still hadn’t killed him, which was a good sign. In fact, they’d taken pains to keep him from seeing where they’d taken him and to hide their own identities, which meant they might let him go when this was all over. Whatever this was. They’d said nothing in his presence. Even more perplexing, they hadn’t seemed interested in whether or not he had anything to say. He’d expected an interrogation of some kind, the painful kind, actually. He knew what kind of techniques the spooks—his counterparts in the CIA—in Afghanistan had used. Sure, Congress had banned waterboarding and other forms of torture. That didn’t mean the techniques weren’t used. Interrogators just got better at keeping it quiet.
Travis had never resorted to torture. His job had been to establish himself as a local and blend in. Or at least befriend the locals and use them to best advantage. He’d preferred carrots to sticks, always looking for the positive incentive, the favor or reward that would motivate a local to help pinpoint the bad guys. That didn’t mean that subjects hadn’t been roughed up on occasion. But he hadn’t needed torture.
Whatever these people wanted, torture or no, they weren’t getting it.
Chapter 6
“You don’t seem very upset,” I said over my shoulder.
If anything, Tess had seemed preoccupied since getting the news at lunch that a fellow student had taken his own life. That kind of news always messed with my head. I didn’t understand it. If I’d learned anything from my years of education and relatively short life, it was that things could change in an instant (like my financial situation when I was informed my profligate grandparents had raided my education fund). When circumstances look their bleakest is usually just about the time they start to improve. Too many kids don’t see that or haven’t experienced it.
Tess came back from the side road her thoughts had taken her down. “Upset? About that suicide? Of course I’m upset. Why wouldn’t I be? Why would you even think that?”
“Sorry. You just seem to be somewhere else, like the kid’s death didn’t register.”
Her fingers gripped my shoulder, nails digging into my skin through the thin nylon of my windbreaker as we walked out to the car.
“I didn’t know him, so it’s not like I’m going to have a breakdown, or burst into tears. But I feel bad for his family. What I’m more upset about is Matt. Didn’t you think he was acting weird?”
“Matt’s a geek. He always acts weird. Curb in two. Step down. One, two.”
“That’s not nice.” She stepped off the curb without missing a beat. We seemed to be getting the hang of this.
“I meant it in the kindest way,” I said. “I like Matt.”
“No, really. Didn’t you see what was going on?”
“He was playing a game app on his phone. Pretty focused.”
“That’s what I mean. He was so into whatever that app is it was like he wasn’t even there.”
I slowed as we approached the car and pressed the key fob in my pocket to unlock it.
“Matt’s pretty intense, Tess. He gets absorbed in tech stuff.”
She shook her head. “Not like this. Did you hear how pissy he got?”
She heard me open the door and automatically put her hand out to find the roof of the car and position herself to get in. I reached out to help her, but she’d already taken her other hand off my shoulder and put it on the open door frame. She quickly eased herself into the passenger seat and waited expectantly. I closed her door, tossed her backpack in the trunk and got in behind the wheel. Glancing over to make sure Tess was belted in, I started up and backed out of the slot.
“Okay,” I said when we’d safely navigated the obstacle course through the parking lot as students left for the day, “so maybe he could have been more civil.”
“That’s not it.” She drummed the center console with her fingers then lifted one to her mouth and nibbled on her fingernail. “There’s something wrong. I just feel it.”
Light rain pattered the car, leaving hundreds of fish-eye lenses rolling down the windshield, distorting the outside world. I flicked a switch and the wipers smeared the droplets against the glass then wiped them away in the second pass.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said. “We all have bad days.”
“It’s not nothing. Didn’t you hear what people were saying?”
“About Matt?” I glanced at her.
She pursed her lips in annoyance. “No, about Ben, the kid who killed himself. I heard lots of people say he left a note. It said he got bit.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but Matt said the game he was playing is called Never Bitten. Don’t you find that odd?”
“You think Matt’s behavior is connected to the kid’s death? I find that odd.”
“Why do you always have to pooh-pooh my ideas?”
“What? I don’t always…” I took a deep breath and checked the mirrors before it was too late to focus on what mattered. “Say you’re right…” I tried not to let my voice make a face. “You’re saying the game app might have made the kid kill himself.”
“All I’m saying is that Matt’s acting weird, and it could be because he’s spending so much time playing that freaking game instead of talking to his friends.”
I wished I could take back my original comment. She was definitely upset, and now I got to bear the brunt.
“Fine. While you’re doing homework, I’ll see what I can learn.”
“Thank you.” She sat in stony silence the rest of the way to the house.
I pulled into the second bay of the five-car garage. The slot closest to the house was reserved for the Range Rover Tess’s Uncle Travis drove. The two vehicles in the spots on the other side of me—an older model sedan and a pickup truck—belonged to Alice Pemberton, the Barretts’ house manager, and Yoshi Kato, the groundskeeper. I know
, it sounded fancy for a house with only two people living in it, but since the house rivals a lot of French chateaus in size, I understood why. At the far end sat another Range Rover identical to Travis’s except squashed as if someone had stepped on it, damage done by an avalanche. The accident had killed Tess’s parents and blinded her.
For good measure, the guesthouse across the courtyard from the main house also had a three-car garage that presently housed two hulking, black SUVs used by the security team that guarded Tess and Travis. One of them slid into an open bay behind me; it had followed us from school.
I retrieved the backpack from the trunk and guided Tess into the house. Alice met us at the kitchen door. Her pensive expression made me pause.
“Ah, there you are,” she said. “Tess, can I get you a snack before you start on homework?”
Tess moved away from me, comfortable in her own surroundings. She kept one hand out in front of her, but walked through the kitchen with confidence and stopped at the big fridge.
“No, thanks, Alice. I think I’ll just get started,” she said as she took out a bottle of water. “You coming, Oliver?”
“Right behind you.”
“Hang on a minute, both of you,” Alice said.
Tess heard the look on Alice’s face and froze. “What is it?”
“It’s Travis. He’s missing.”
“What do you mean, missing?” Tess clutched the counter so tightly her knuckles whitened.
Alice sighed. “We’re not sure what happened. His assistant Robyn called from work an hour after he’d left wondering where he was. I had Marcus send someone out to look for him. I…”
In the few weeks I’d worked as Tess’s assistant, I’d never seen Alice show much emotion. The woman had coolly faced off against an assassin with a kitchen knife while two others came in the back door armed with submachine guns. Now worry creased her face, and her voice broke. She straightened and collected herself so quickly I almost thought maybe I’d imagined her discomfort.
“I’m sorry, Tess,” she went on. “They found his Range Rover abandoned less than a mile up the street. He was nowhere in the vicinity, and he’s not answering his cell phone. It looks like he may have been kidnapped, but we haven’t received any calls or gotten any demands.”
Tess paled, and her hand went to her mouth.
“Oh, my god. Is it the same people who came after me? Why would they take Travis?”
“We don’t know, Tess. There’s no sense worrying about it until we find out more.”
“Do you think they took him to get back at me? Oh, god, Alice, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to do everything we can to try to find him. In the mean time, we have to be patient while Marcus and the team investigate.”
“This is all my fault,” Tess moaned.
“No, it’s not.” Alice’s voice knifed through Tess’s self-pity, bringing her head up sharply at the sound. “I don’t want to hear you talk like that, Tess. There’s nothing you could have done to prevent this. Travis is resourceful. He’s a soldier, and he’s been in worse spots. He’ll be fine.”
“You don’t even know where he is. How can you say that?”
“Because I know a little bit about what he did for six years in Afghanistan, young lady. Trust me, if there’s anyone who can take care of himself that person is Travis. Now, why don’t you get started on homework, and I’ll bring you a snack in a minute. Oliver, take Tess to the library and help her get settled, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Tess shrugged off my attempt to gently guide her toward the library, stubbornly feeling her way out of the kitchen and down the long hallway. Her arms flailed as she walked, like bug antennae, or a child playing Blind Man’s Buff. She strode with confidence until her steps took her angling into a wall. The impulse to help her shoved me forward, but I restrained my hand just in time. She stopped, reoriented herself and set off again, this time trailing a finger along the wall. When she touched the library door, she turned in and crossed the open space with hands outstretched until they felt the back of a chair at a long table. She slid into the seat.
The library contrasted starkly with the rest of the modern house. On three walls, traditional mahogany shelving climbed two stories high. A huge stone fireplace divided the shelves on one wall. The fourth wall, made entirely of French style windows, let in lots of light. The study table with four straight-backed chairs where Tess sat stood in the nearest third of the room, a green glass banker’s lamp hanging over it. A couch and easy chairs faced the fireplace. A smaller seating area and a study carrel filled opposite corners. A spiral staircase led up to a mezzanine-level catwalk that accessed the higher shelves, and an entire section of shelving opened up into a secret safe room. Closed now, the room had served as Tess’s father’s home office. Of course, he wasn’t around to use it anymore, and Travis had taken over a small den down the hall.
I walked to the other side of the table and set the backpack on the table. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “Everything.” She sobbed once loudly, her blues eyes brimming with tears. I froze, glad she couldn’t see that tears rendered me helpless. She swallowed hard and choked back another sob.
“First Matt, then Ben’s suicide. Now this.”
“It’s going to be all right,” I fibbed.
“You don’t understand. This morning I told Uncle Travis I hate him. That’s the last thing I said to him. What if I never see him again?” Her lip quivered.
“You will,” I said quickly. “Come on, Tess. He’s like Rambo.”
A couple of weeks earlier, Travis and the security team had saved our butts from a squad of assassins bent on taking out Tess and anyone else who got in the way in a firefight up in the mountains. I was still sketchy on details because I’d been jumped and knocked out cold as we were trying to escape.
“You don’t really hate him, do you?” I said quietly.
“No. Yes.” She threw up her hands. “I don’t know! He’s just so infuriating. He smothers me, worse than my mother ever did.”
“Not your dad?”
“God, no. Dad was always cool. I mean, he could be maddening, too, because he always backed up whatever Mom said. But when it was just the two of us, he pretty much let me do whatever I wanted. It wasn’t until Travis showed up that Dad got really protective.”
“Yeah, well, now you know why.”
“It isn’t fair.” She sighed and sank into her chair.
I slid the backpack closer, pulled out some books and consulted the notes I’d taken regarding her assignments.
“Not that much today,” I said. “What do you want to do first?”
“Math, please.”
She knocked off the math homework quickly, and she moved on to music. Twenty minutes later, Alice showed up with a tray loaded with mugs of cocoa, cookies and fruit. She set it down without a word and left as quietly as she’d come in. Tess raised her head, sniffed the air and took off the headphones she wore. I took her hand and wrapped her fingers around a warm mug.
She sniffed again. “Hot chocolate?”
“Cookies and fruit here, too.”
She nodded and bent her head to the cup. I was about to take a big bite from an apple when Marcus strode into the room. Tess stiffened and cocked her head slightly, a frown tugging the corners of her mouth down. The size and build of an NFL wide receiver, Marcus Jackson headed up Travis’s security team. One of four former Army Special Forces soldiers on the team including Travis, Marcus had gotten the job by virtue of his former rank more than any other qualification. At least it seemed that way to me. Luis, a former Marine, and Kenny, an Army Ranger before he’d come to work for Travis, were junior in rank, but had almost as much combat experience. Kenny, though, had been killed in the firefight. The other three members of the security team—Fred, Barney and Red, a Navy SEAL—also had more experience than Marcus, but didn’t outrank him. Nor did any of them want the job as far as
I could tell. Despite having been a lieutenant, Marcus didn’t seem like an officer or a gentleman. Tess didn’t like him.
“Good, you’re both here,” he said as he approached us. “I just spoke with Alice, so I know she told you about Travis.”
“Have you found him?” Tess said.
“Not yet,” Marcus said. “But here’s the deal. Until we find him or find out what happened, I’m in command. Do you understand? You don’t make a move, you don’t breath unless I know about it. Screw up one time, and I’ll snap a home monitoring bracelet on both your ankles so fast you won’t know I was there. Are we clear?”
“You’re going to make me a prisoner in my own house?”
“Not if you do what I tell you,” Marcus said.
“Fine.” Her voice was grim. “Then you better find him.” Her nose wrinkled.
Marcus turned to me, eyes boring a hole in my skull. “I’m not going to have any problems here, right?”
“Not with me,” I said.
Marcus stared a moment longer. With a curt nod he turned and walked out of the room.
“Is he gone?” Tess said.
“I think so.”
Her nose was scrunched up again. “Do you smell that? I don’t know where Marcus has been, but he reeks.”
I took a cautious sniff, then a bigger one and caught a faint odor that reminded me of the countryside around the small town where my grandparents raised me.
“Manure?”
“Yeah, gross. And something else, too. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Where’s he been?”
Blind Instinct: A Tess Barrett Thriller Page 4