Escapade

by Lisa Marie Rice

  She gave a faint smile. “So. Our guy frequented no news sites at all. Presumably he got all the news he needed at work. Then I broke down his presence on the forums. He used a program to cloak his IP, but for an NSA guy he was fairly easy to follow. He didn’t put real work into hiding his IP. He just used avatars, like most of the other guys on the forums. Discussions are weird. It sometimes gets a little freaky when it’s not super nerdy. His deep desire to own a Ferrari is palpable on all the forums. And look here.”

  She pointed to one of the tiles in the center of the screen. It was a photograph of a pudgy male hand, palm open, indicating a shelf of … something. Some objects. Bennett leaned closer.

  “I took a high-density photo of the thumb and index figure, turned them into 3D images and compared them to the prints on file of Arthur Kudlow. They match. And check out those shelves.” With a click of her mouse that looked like it was made out of titanium, the tile zoomed out and Bennett could see three rows of shiny, red … things.

  Another click and the tile zoomed out even more and now he could see that the shiny red things were replica cars. Ferraris. At least forty of them, remarkably well made.

  “Most of those are collectors’ items and cost at least $1,000 each, sometimes more,” Elle said. “I checked.”

  “Jesus.” Bennett did a quick calculation in his head. “Huh. So on those three rows must be —”

  “Almost fifty thousand dollars’ worth of replica models.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars’ worth of toys?” Bennett asked, aghast.

  “The collectors definitely don’t consider them toys. They are stand-ins for the real thing and there were four days of forum debate on the color of the sidewalls. It’s a whole world and it’s not too healthy.”

  “Apparently not.” He gave a side glance to Elle. “Kudlow disappeared but didn’t take his expensive toys with him.”

  “No, he didn’t. And I think I know why. Anyway, the next tile —” Her mouse moved and the tile instantly blew up. “The next tile is a publication. Our Kudlow is a subscriber to ENZO, which is a magazine dedicated to the original designer, Enzo Ferrari. The subscription to the paper magazine is in his name. He canceled it eight weeks ago. He also canceled tickets to a Formula 1 race in Texas. He didn’t get his money back.”

  “He was already planning his escape,” Bennett said.

  Elle nodded. “I think he realized that he might have something that would make all his money problems go away forever and that might be better than a subscription to a magazine.”

  Bennett looked at her. “The files.”

  “Mmm. According to your data he disappeared a month ago. So his last known location is on an outbound chartered private jet bound for Paris. And then the flight plan disappeared.”

  “That’s right.” It burned. It burned that they hadn’t been able to trace him, knowing the destination, though they’d brought major crunching power to the chase. One of his operatives had even gone to Paris Orly with several photographs but Kudlow’s passport wasn’t in the system as having landed and facial recognition run through the security cameras came up empty. Everyone in the company was frustrated.

  “I know he disappeared between Connecticut and Paris, somehow. And I think you and your company have probably run through every possible permutation, have thought of every contingency, trying to figure out where he’s gone and how he got there.”

  “Yup,” he confirmed gloomily. “Put in thousands of hours. Like I said, the pilot has disappeared, as well. Either he was paid to disappear or Kudlow disappeared him. They didn’t land in Paris.”

  “Well, I didn’t try to replicate what you guys are doing, that would be duplication of effort. What I did was make the leap forward. He has to be somewhere. Setting aside the problem of how he got there, where is he now? That’s what we really need to know.”

  Those glowing eyes caught his and for a second wiped out the thinking part of his brain until he shook himself back into the moment. Damn. Concentrate. “Okay.”

  “So —” she blew up another tile. “Presuming that Kudlow changed his coordinates but not his personality, I pulled on the Ferrari thread. Because one thing is clear. He now has the money to indulge his passion. From what you say, he has plenty of it.”

  “Yeah.” Bennett’s jaws clenched. “And that money is blood money.”

  She shot him a quick glance of understanding. “That’s why it’s important to get him. And … I have.”

  He leaned forward instantly. “That photo of him. Show me again.”

  “First, let me describe the steps I took to get there. It’s important.”

  She wasn’t showing off, that was clear. And Bennett did want to hear how she got there. Another few minutes wasn’t going to change anything. He was definitely going to learn something here. “Okay. Show me.”

  “Right. I started from here.” Another tile, this with various words of different sizes. A word cloud. The larger the word the more often that word appeared. The largest word was Ferrari. The words that were the next size down were all related to the cars or manufacturer. Other words were tiny. “He has an interest in 1980s pop, God knows why. He did some research for the purchase of a designer jacket, settled on Ralph Lauren. And has an interest in the actress Anne Hathaway. But overwhelmingly, he is interested in Ferraris, in every aspect of them. In fact —” she pulled up another tile, “here is the breakdown of time spent. Like I said before, he spends on average five hours a day on the internet, 4.7 hours on Ferrari-related topics. I traced three avatars on the forums, particularly obsessed, back to him. Their handles are Piero, Dino and Alfredo. Enzo Ferrari’s son, father and brother. Kudlow doesn’t seem to have a private life worth talking about. So his being a monomaniac of all things Ferrari is a real big help. With that …”

  Another page, lists of names.

  “With that, I began the search in earnest. He canceled his paper subscription to ENZO a month before disappearing. This is a list of requests for online subscriptions to ENZO starting from the day he disappeared. There are 82 requests, from all over the world.”

  Another list. “These are new avatars on the forums, or rather people who have never posted before, starting from the day of his disappearance. Three names began to post regularly, showing a fanatical interest in the topics he was rabid about, starting from the week after he disappeared. Anselmo, Drake, Cavalier. The IP was different, but a word frequency analysis gave an 85% probability of it being the same author. All eventually traceable back to the same IP, though I had to work a little to find that out.” Elle frowned, shook her head. “Anselmo is Enzo Ferrari’s middle name. His nickname was ‘il Drake’ and he was made a Knight by the Italian government, a Cavaliere. Those three avatars shared the same IP.”

  “Wow.” Bennett sat back. “That’s amazing. I think with the IP alone we could find him.”

  “Oh.” Elle gave a secretive little smile. “I told you. I’ve already found him! The IP is traceable back to Bali. I’ll bet he wanted to start his new life immediately. I can’t imagine him waiting too long. If he has a lot of money stashed away, he’ll want his Ferrari immediately. As a matter of fact,” she looked at Bennett with sorrow, “I can well imagine that buying himself a Ferrari was what prompted him to turn treasonous. Though I cannot imagine committing treason and causing people to be murdered for a car.”

  Bennett had known people to kill for an imagined slight. For pride, for a fucking cigarette. A car — a Ferrari no less — was incentive enough for some. You’d have to be a psychopath, of course, but plenty of those around.

  Elle pointed at the screen. “So the nearest dealership is in Jakarta. There’s a waiting list of about two months so I imagined he’d want to get his name in fast. And sure enough, a week after disappearing, we have a Mr. Colby Sanders ordering a Ferrari with all the trimmings from the Jakarta dealership. It cost £250,000.”

  A security cam image came up on her monitor and goddamn! There he was! Arthur Kudlow. He’d sh
aved his head and grown a brand-new moth-eaten ginger goatee and he had a reddish tan, but there he was, shaking hands with someone who was presumably the owner of the dealership, wearing a shit-eating grin. Ordering his dream car, the car that had so far cost five lives and would cost many more. Not that Arthur gave a flying fuck. He was getting his shiny red wet dream.

  Bennett turned his head. The reason no more people would die and that Arthur would soon be in prison was sitting right next to him, the smartest and most beautiful woman he’d ever known. Who’d found one man among the seven and a half billion people in the world. A man who’d wiped all traces of his previous self, and who’d had an army of the best and brightest looking for him.

  “What?” Elle had said something and he wasn’t listening.

  “I said,” she repeated patiently, “he tried to change his appearance, but facial recognition doesn’t pay attention to hair on the head or facial hair. Facial recognition is based on distance between pupils, the shape of ears, the distance between the nose and mouth. It’s him. Definitely. So with that knowledge, I looked at the purchase order and came up with his address, which corresponds to a luxury villa ten miles from Denpasar, the capital of Bali. I hacked into the villa’s security cameras and sure enough —”

  Another photograph, this time of a naked Arthur Ludlow near an elaborately decorated sky-blue swimming pool.

  They both stared. “Maybe I should have pixelated his genitals,” she said finally, scrunching her nose in distaste.

  “Two pixels,” he answered. “That’s all it would take. That man clearly needs a Ferrari as compensation for what Mother Nature didn’t give him. Right. I need to call this in. Do you think you can —”

  “Done.” Elle gave him one of her satisfied smiles. “I put all the info in a file and I’ve already sent it to you. Look for a file called Finding Kudlow in your downloads.”

  He had his cell to his ear as he opened the file up with one hand. Sure enough, there it was. When his right-hand man, Stuart Forsyth, answered, he said, “Stu. We found Ludlow. Or rather —” he shot a sideways glance at Elle. “Someone very bright found him for us. I’m sending you the entire file, plus recent photos. One of which is pretty nasty, will make your eyes bleed. But you’re tough. You survived Hell Week with me, so you can take it. Make sure Kudlow’s former employer is informed. And call off our dogs and give them a couple of days off. They’ve been working on this nonstop.”

  “You wrapping up the current job too, boss?” Stuart asked.

  Bennett had a moment of panic. Wrapping this job up? God no! Because then he’d have to tip Elle back into the world and he loved it here with her, in their deluxe den. “No!” he said, then tempered his voice when Elle looked at him in surprise. He cleared his throat. “No, ah. Still the same contract. We’ll be in touch. Forward that file.”

  Stuart waited a beat, two. He was no dummy. “Oh-kay boss. Keep it loose.” He disconnected, leaving Bennett holding his cell with a clammy hand. He’d broken out in a sweat at the thought of leaving Elle.

  Keep it loose. Yeah.

  Elle smiled at him. It wasn’t a sweet gentle girly smile. It was a smile full of challenge. Throw me something really hard, it said. The air around her vibrated. Bennett had something hard for her. Real hard.

  They’d been working their way toward this from the beginning.

  Well, maybe not the beginning beginning, when he’d knocked her out and kidnapped her, but soon after she woke up. Elle had never felt so alive in her life as next to this strong savvy man, who was both a modern guy and at the same time made her feel like Cave Girl 1.0. The unwoke model.

  He put a big hand behind her head and brought her face toward his. He didn’t need to exert pressure in any way, she came willingly. As a matter of fact, she’d die if she didn’t get a chance to come closer to him, touch him all over.

  Before, he’d kissed her, but now she kissed him. It was absolutely irresistible, like magnetic filings. Like there was a vast tilting of the earth that tilted her right into his arms and nothing else was possible.

  Only this.

  While kissing, Bennett reached and lifted her onto his lap as if she weighed nothing. She straddled him, feeling the strength of his thighs under her, feeling the strength of his shoulders against her arms.

  She had sensory overload, as if kissing Bennett while holding him at the same time was simply too much. Her head pulled back and she watched his face while her body was going haywire.

  They’d kissed, sure, but it had been fleeting. Now, it seemed that all of her was touching him. Her thighs were opened wide over his own thick thighs and a big hand against her back, between her shoulder blades, held her chest against his. She felt like melting, held together by his arms around her.

  Bennett didn’t look like he was melting. Every muscle she could touch felt tense and hard. His face, too, was tense, a little pale. As if there were some strong emotion there. His eyes, slightly narrowed, were studying her.

  What was he seeing?

  Not the normal Elle, nope. The normal Elle was always detached, a little remote, even when in the arms of a man. Well, she’d never been in the arms of a man like Bennett before and she didn’t feel detached. She felt attached, if anything. Tied to Bennett by some kind of supernatural glue. She couldn’t pull away from him if she tried. And she didn’t want to try.

  His eyes alone were holding her. Dark and penetrating, as if he could see right into her. Normally, Elle thought of herself as a fairly complicated person. But right now? Right now she was reduced to the essentials, skin holding together raging hormones. She was boiling inside, an intense heat that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room.

  Bennett noticed it. Of course he did. He noticed everything. His dark eyes roamed her face, watching her carefully. The hand against her back, holding her to him, dropped to the hem of her top and slid under it. His eyes narrowed even further as her eyes drooped and as she became even pinker. She could actually feel the rush of blood to her face. And to the area between her legs. The very first time she’d felt that happen. It was like a sunburst in her core. She drew in a long, shaky breath.

  So this, this was desire. Not a mild itch but a raging storm penetrating every cell. She’d read about it and thought it was like a literary convention, but no. It was real. This was real. And it was amazing.

  Her body doing its own bidding, not hers. It sort of felt like even if she, as a person, didn’t want Bennett, her body sure did. Her body, separate from her.

  It was lucky then, that she wanted Bennett, too.

  She wasn’t the only one with a rush of blood. Bennett had a rush of blood to his groin, too. She was sitting practically right on top of him and could feel everything. He was huge, which would have worried her if all the worry receptors hadn’t been burned right out of her brain.

  Elle firmly believed in equality of the sexes. He was feeling her under her top so she would, too. She ran her hands over his broad back down to the hem of his sweater and slipped both hands underneath the fine wool.

  Oh God. Warm skin, hard muscle. She’d never felt anything like it. There was electricity in touching him, like touching something primal, a force of nature. His skin was a magnet for her hands.

  He was kissing her neck which — surprise! — was an erogenous zone. When he gently dragged his teeth along a sensitive part of her neck she curled her nails into his back as heat blossomed inside her. His penis grew. He bit her again and she moaned and clutched his back and his penis grew even longer, harder.

  Their bodies were engaged in a little erotic dance.

  She explored the broad expanse of his back, feeling each muscle distinctly. Then her fingers encountered hard tissue. Scar tissue, round. A bullet scar, where he’d been shot. She touched it lightly then lifted her head as he lifted his.

  They stared at each other. A muscle twitched in his jaw.

  Elle was a storm of emotions, all raw and real. This was as real as it got. He’d been shot
and survived. He could have died. He’d put his life on the line and had paid the price, but he was still here.

  If he had died, she’d never have known this. In her almost thirty years on this earth she’d never felt this burning desire before and probably never would have if not for Bennett.

  She fingered his scar. “You survived,” she whispered.

  He nodded, a short jerk of his head.

  “I’m so glad you did.” The words came out of her without volition, straight from the depths of her heart.

  She was so glad he was alive and right here in her arms.

  Bennett closed his eyes and kissed her again. He kissed her with his whole body and she broke out in goose bumps. It was so intense she could hardly breathe, could barely move except to wriggle to get even closer to him.

  His hand pressed down against her back while moving his hips forward and suddenly she was riding him. The folds of her sex opened up and there he was, separated from her flesh by layers of cloth, hers and his.

  She moved, riding him, and felt him shudder.

  Oh, wow. She made this strong man, the strongest man she’d ever met, shudder and shake. This was power, power unlike any she’d ever known before. She was the most powerful woman in the world.

  Let’s test this, she thought, and nipped his lower lip. He jolted, kissed her harder. A twist of her hips and she slid along his penis and he moaned into her mouth, tightening his arms around her. Digging her hands into his back she slid over him again while heat erupted everywhere she touched him.

  Again and again, and suddenly he surged up with her in his arms and carried them into her bedroom. It felt like flying, like she had suddenly been freed from the bonds of the earth. Better than flying because he was still kissing her. Dimly, Elle wondered how he didn’t bump into the furniture but he didn’t. In an instant, Bennett was laying her down on the bed. For a moment, just a moment, she felt cold because he wasn’t holding her any more. But then he was stripping and she didn’t feel cold at all. If anything, the heat notched up several degrees.