Authors: Stuart Keane
The man rubbed his chin and continued watching.
FIVE
Fifteen minutes.
Fifteen bloody minutes!
Kathryn Cox struck her bunk in anger. The bunk replied with a faint squeak, the age of its bolts and nuts and screws obvious, its lack of maintenance even more apparent. The dark room gave away nothing about the surroundings, but Kathryn knew she was being held captive.
At first she thought that to lock her in a room with no light, food or water was someone’s idea of a lame, but very sick, joke. She even thought she'd been placed in a police cell for disrupting the peace or for committing a drunken assault or something along similar lines. It wouldn’t be the first time, that’s for sure.
Except that she hadn’t been out drinking the night before.
Or in the last three months to be exact.
Before she had awoken on this stinking bunk she had been sleeping in her bed peacefully. Plenty of overtime had been available at work recently, and as much as she hated her job, she needed the extra money: holidays don’t buy themselves. The only problem was that working long shifts required a lot of sleep to recover from them. Being able to sleep wasn’t an issue, but the extra rest made her feel lazy. And her job motivation went out the window, which meant she didn’t go to the gym as much, and her eating got out of hand. All because of her fucking job.
So going from her peaceful bed and waking up somewhere completely different was a little unsettling. It scared her.
And Kathryn Cox didn’t get scared.
It wasn’t in her nature.
She found that there was little in life that was worth getting scared about. She was sick of people whining about life and its problems: the issues and scenarios and politics that being a human being brought about. How people couldn’t cope with everyday issues such as money, jobs, relating to others, being a celebrity. How people lived within a certain spectrum, and if that spectrum became fragmented or distorted in any way, shape or form, they completely collapsed, and became useless.
Fear ruled all.
Kathryn believed the UK had operated this way for decades. When it’s sunny or raining, the country is fine, the people are used to it (the latter more so), but when it snows, the whole of Britain goes into meltdown. Everyone stops, just as a computer crashes or a heart dies when age has won its final battle. A comedian she admired once said, “If terrorists wanted to shut this country down, you would only have to take out one hundred celebrities and watch the country have a nervous breakdown.”
She had to agree with the sentiment.
Kathryn didn’t plan on sticking around, she wanted to get out of Britain anyway. A little home in France was what she wanted. She just had to get there first.
Patience, in two years you will get there,
she thought.
Well, if you can get home again first,
she reasoned.
All these thoughts had been running around in her head when a loud clicking sound filled the room. It then disappeared as quickly and abruptly as it had rung out. Kathryn hadn't noticed anything about the room while she was sitting on the bunk. She'd been distracted, deep in thought, keeping herself calm. She didn’t scare easily, but then again, normal situations weren't scary. Being locked in a mysterious, cloying dark room? Kathryn imagined it to be every human’s personal nightmare, and if not, pretty close to it.
Helplessness had almost taken over her thoughts now, but she realised she couldn’t let that happen.
The click had come from somewhere. She thought about the door – there had to be one. After all, that had to be the route through which she’d arrived here in the first place. She stood up, intending to investigate the sound.
And she suddenly fell to the ground in a heap, the breath knocked out of her. Her legs simply refused to support her weight. She lay on the cold hard floor and cursed the fact that she hadn’t been more careful. At first the thought of being a cripple for life panicked her. When rationality had set in, she realised that in order to get here, she must have been drugged, and her legs giving way was probably a side effect of the medication.
Using all her strength, Kathryn pulled herself up off of the floor onto the bunk once more.
Fifteen minutes later, when her legs were feeling better and she was angry for wasting precious time, she punched her bunk. The second time she tried to stand up, her legs had supported her. Breathing out, she slid her hands down them to make sure they were okay, that she was standing and could remain upright.
Now to see what that noise was.
Gingerly she walked across the room, aware that she could see nothing and that she might collide with something sooner rather than later. Her hands moved out in front of her, instinctively feeling the way. They didn’t take long to find a wooden surface, her fingertips detecting splinters and a doorknob. It took even less time to find out the door was ajar and a good few feet of gap was between the door and its frame. However, it took Kathryn even longer to think about going through the opening.
Hesitation had set in early. Kathryn wasn’t a stupid person. She was methodical, cautious, liked to think things through and act only when appropriate. Who knew what stood beyond that doorway? She had been put in this room for a reason, and whoever put her there didn’t want her escaping.
Or did they?
If she was a prisoner, why did the door open?
This made her even more suspicious.
The open door was like bait, a trick, a human sized Venus fly trap. Someone
did
want her to escape. Whoever it was wanted her to go through that door and walk straight into a trap.
Maybe she was paranoid, maybe she wasn’t.
But she wasn’t stupid.
Kathryn Cox was staying put.
***
The second man cursed his monitor on the desk in front of him. He stood up and circled his luxurious office, only parts of the interior visible from the solitary light on the desk. Shadows bounced across the room and the desk and the floor. The man took a seat and tapped his keyboard. The camera zoomed in to show the woman sitting on her bunk. Minutes before she had been at the door, about to leave the room. Now she had come back to sit down again. Not moving, staying put.
Bitch!
Get out of there! I'm already three minutes behind everyone else!
His cool attitude had gone now, his face a mask of anger. Sweat beaded his brow and his hair was dishevelled, as his fingers ran through it.
That little bitch had no idea what was at stake. Only he knew what was riding on this. And as it stood, the odds were severely stacked against him.
He rubbed his face, wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand.
Then he smiled.
He tapped a button on the keyboard, which brought up a red bar on the screen. It read thirty five out of one hundred. He tapped another key and the number rose to forty five, then fifty.
Feel the heat, bitch!
SIX
Heather Mason was concerned.
Concerned and confused. And a little sick.
It'd been three minutes since she'd stepped through the door that rendered her a prisoner. Thirty seconds of that had been taken up with her finding the end of the dark tunnel that led to her previous temporary home. Another door had greeted her, which meant the tunnel had been a little less than double the size of her cell. The second door had been shut, but not locked.
Opening it had brought her to her current situation.
It took a full minute for her eyes to adjust to the light that welcomed her. In fact, she had to shut her eyes
and
use her hands as a shield while her eyes focused on the light. It was like staring at the sun, it burned at first. At one point she even turned away. Once she had prepared herself, she turned back to the room in front of her.
And looked down.
Her clothes!
When she went to work (today, yesterday, last week?), she had been dressed in a two-piece pinstripe grey trouser suit. The trousers were snug around her butt and thighs, and finished neatly just above her ankle. Her ankles had been hidden that day by black leather boots, newly polished and immaculate. She liked to polish her shoes regularly, appearances meant everything in her job. Looking good got you places, it meant you were paid more and sometimes it meant the boss might want to fuck you, and smooth the way towards rapid promotion - not that Heather was interested in such perks. Heather just liked to look good, because it made her feel good, and it helped her forget the bad memories of her mother. The suit she’d been wearing had been finished off with a matching jacket, and underneath she had worn a thin white tee shirt with a white supporting bra. Minimal make-up and a brush through her hair had given her the elegance that she had always radiated since the age of fourteen. Twenty years on, she could still knock them dead.
Not today she wouldn’t.
She hadn’t a mirror to hand, but she imagined she looked atrocious.
Her suit had gone, well most of it had. The jacket and her trouser legs up to the middle thigh had been removed. The trousers had lost their belt, and her shoes and socks had been removed too. The white tee shirt remained, but the bra had been taken, the thought of someone removing it made her feel nauseous and violated.
Her jewellery was gone, as were her hairpins, and her make-up had been washed off. She couldn’t feel the foundation on her skin or the eyeliner on her eyelashes. She touched her lips and felt the chapped skin. Heather didn’t wear lipstick, but having a chap stick right now would be a godsend. Her blonde hair was hanging down in strands, randomly, in total disarray.
Removal of the hairpins had destroyed her hairstyle. Her hands smoothed it back over her head in a vain attempt to make it look better. She knew it didn’t matter. Slipping a hand inside her trousers she checked that her underwear was still there and breathed a sigh of relief when she found it was. However, the waistline was saggy. Someone had removed the elastic from the panties. A rag of the underwear stuck out where someone had snipped the material with a pair of scissors. A wave of sickness came over her again. Heather assumed that the underwear-snipper was the same person who had removed everything else, denying her any tools or weapons in the process. A clever person.
Whoever put her here didn’t want things to be easy for her.
Heather looked up, and for a second was bemused.
The confusion had arisen when she saw the room before her. At first it looked like a meaningless silver room, its walls made of steel, its floor marble tile and all its furniture made of steel too. The centre of the floor had a circular piece of metal in it, with holes punched through. The only steel furniture she saw was a table positioned neatly in the corner beneath a mirror. A tray sat on top of the table and a syringe sat beside it, with a neat manila folder placed in a plastic holder on the wall. The holder held a name saying WILLIS. The name didn’t ring a bell with Heather, but she stepped nearer and took a look at the items closely. There was nothing of interest. The room was very chilly, and when she looked up she noticed an air duct.
Air conditioning
, she thought,
great. I'm fucking freezing.
The realisation hit Heather like a bullet, making her gasp and her eyes widen. Moving over to the table, she saw a second door in the wall beside her. It was reflected in the mirror above the table. The mirror was nearly as big as the wall, the size of an average house window. Heather peered closely.
Then she ducked beneath the mirror and leaned against the steel wall. Her rump was cold against the marble tiling beneath her. Her preferred environment was an office or her home, but she knew a two-way mirror when she saw one: she was aware that police used them all the time.
Someone was watching her.
***
The third man finished his JD and put the tumbler down on the desk. Reaching to his left, he pulled open his desk drawer and paused before taking the fifth bottle of JD from the selection he had there. He unscrewed the cap, enjoying the click of the new sealed lid breaking for the first time. Removing the cap, he sniffed the bottle’s contents and sighed. He poured some into his used glass and shook the half melted ice around in the mixture. He placed the bottle back in the drawer and closed it. He sipped.
A smile crept across his lips once again.
The woman was starting to bore him, something he'd expected. She was simple, cautious, not daring enough to do anything rash or adventurous. He knew this to be the case. It was the reason he outbid everyone for her, the reason he intentionally made it his duty to make sure that he got her no matter what. After all, what was a few hundred thousand pounds between friends?
He had picked her for a reason. It was because she was so simple and methodical. She thought things through, a thinker. There were other reasons too, but he kept those to himself.
Thinkers can be misled. Manipulated, led astray, decoyed, their mind set could be distorted. Paranoia plays a huge part in their final decisions. If pushed right, people can do anything on a whim. Thinkers were a rare breed, the sort psychics seek out and prey on. Total control, you just have to know where to push. So far, he had been right on the button. He stared at the monitor as he sipped his beverage.
His first room, he had the choice to have a window, or no window, or just four walls solidly built with few items within the room. He had paid extra for a two-way mirror. Of course, there was no two-way, the other side of the mirror faced the interior of a disused warehouse, no one could see in, or out. But she had taken the bait perfectly, seen the mirror and thought that she was being watched.
She was right, of course, the four hidden cameras in the room were testimony to that.
A shame she would never know.
The man watched, his interest piqued once again.