“I’m listening,” Max said.
“What I’m not ready to do, is to sit here, fucking around, until enough reinforcements arrive so you can drag my ass to jail,” Morant told him. “If that’s your plan—”
“When you worked for Chai,” Max prompted.
Morant started over. He knew damn well he had no choice. “When I worked for Chai, we sometimes used an Internet message board to communicate. When I arrived here in Hamburg, sure enough, there was a message waiting for me there. Same code we used to use, directing me to an e-mail account already set up. Whoever the kidnappers are, they’re good.”
“How much money do they want?” Max asked, as Morant began to pull himself to his feet. He drew his own weapon, aimed it at the other man. “I didn’t say you could stand.”
Morant looked at him, looked at the gun. He didn’t seem impressed. “If we don’t leave here, some time in the very near future, very close to
now,
your friends from the Hamburg office are going to come in here, see me, and do their best to ship me back to the States. At which point, we’re fucked. You, me, Molly, and Gina.”
Of course Morant might not feel so threatened by a gun held in the hand of the man who’d already killed him once today. Killed him, but then brought him back to life.
“I
will
shoot you,” Max said. “I know you don’t think I’ll do it—”
“Actually, I do,” Morant said. “In fact, I’m counting on it—if it comes down to that. A word of warning though. If you do it here, it’s going to make transporting my body all the way to Indonesia one giant, sucking pain in the balls.”
And suddenly, it all made sense. The nearly illegible words on Morant’s arm. It wasn’t
trace the form,
it was
trade them for me.
They didn’t want money—the people who took Molly and Gina. They wanted Grady Morant.
And, if they couldn’t get them out any other way, Morant was ready to deliver.
“I don’t know for sure who wants me,” Morant said quietly, “but whoever they are, they’re connected to Chai. And that means they’re not going to play by the rules—their goal is going to be to hurt me as badly as they possibly can. If they get me alive, they’re not going to release Molly and Gina. Instead they’ll make me watch them die.”
Christ.
“I will not let that happen,” Morant continued. “But I’m going to need your help.” He smiled grimly. “Yours and those Navy SEALs you had working with you last time we met. Here’s how it’s going to work—and by the way, this deal is nonnegotiable. You use your resources to help me find Molly and Gina. You and your supermen help me get them out alive. If everything goes well and I’m still standing when it’s over, I’m all yours. You can write the confession yourself—I’ll sign whatever you want. But you and your fucked-up government don’t get to touch me until Molly is safe and secure. And guaranteed to stay that way.”
Max gazed at Morant. Correct procedure had him stepping back from this. He was involved—he couldn’t be called upon to make the right decisions when Gina’s life was on the line. But was he really going to put Gina’s life into someone else’s hands?
Who could he trust with something like that?
Morant was right—first thing they needed to do was to get out of here. Once Frisk’s team showed up, he’d have far fewer choices.
Max put the safety back on his gun. Reholstered it. Took off what was left of his jacket. “Get your weapon,” he ordered Morant. “Let’s go.”
And, of course, because it had been exactly that sort of crazy, bad-luck, fucked-up year, it was too late.
Someone knocked on the hotel room door.
C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN
S
OMEWHERE IN
E
ASTERN
E
UROPE
E
XACT
D
ATE
: U
NKNOWN
P
RESENT
D
AY
They were alive.
So far, at least, they were still alive.
Gina had always heard that the survival rate of abductees dropped significantly the moment they got into a car with their abductor.
She wondered what the odds were for abductees who were put into a metal shipping container.
Although, for the first time in days they weren’t being held at gun-point by a WWE–sized woman who spoke just enough English to be able to order them not to talk.
“Are you all right?” Molly whispered now from the darkness.
Gina had a splinter in her butt from an unfortunate encounter with a wooden pallet. And she had been certain not just once, but many times over the past blur of days that her life was about to end violently. Oh, yeah, and she was currently sitting in a box without any source of light.
All right
didn’t quite cut it.
Still at least this was a fairly large box. It wasn’t large enough for them to stand up, but they could both sit comfortably, and even lie down.
“Yeah, I’m okay. Are
you
all right?” she asked, because a butt-splinter was nothing compared to what Molly must’ve been feeling. This was
so
not what the doctor had had in mind when he’d given Molly instructions to take it easy for a few days.
“I’m a little sore,” Molly admitted. “And queasy. What else is new? Gina, I am
so
sorry—”
“Me, too,” Gina said.
As the darkness pressed in on her, she moved her face closer to the short length of hose that provided them with outside air. Wherever they were, it smelled like diesel. It was dank and polluted.
And very, very dark.
God, she wanted Max. She wanted him to come and rescue her. She wanted to hear his voice, to have him tell her to stay calm, that he was on his way.
That he was sorry for being such a jerk, and that he loved her and wanted to spend the entire rest of her life as her personal slave, to try to make up for it.
Hey, as long as she was fantasizing about the impossible, she might as well dream big.
“I can’t believe you didn’t run away when you had the chance.” Gina’s voice shook. “His gun was on me.”
“And leave you?” Molly countered. Gina heard her moving around. “Never. Besides, I’m the one they want. There’s something in here with us. Bottles. Plastic ones.”
“That name the Italian man kept mentioning,” Gina asked Molly, as she, too, gingerly reached out in the darkness to see what she could feel. “Grady Morant?”
“That’s Jones’s real name.”
That was what Gina had thought. Molly had told her that Dave Jones was as much of an alias as Leslie Pollard, but had never told her exactly what her husband’s name truly was.
Grady. Huh. He didn’t look like a Grady.
“And those people with the guns in Gretta’s studio?” Gina asked as her hand closed around a blanket. Not one but two. “Are they looking for Grady Morant, too?”
The angry people with the guns who’d all started shooting in the forger’s studio . . . It was a miracle Gina and Molly hadn’t been killed.
That woman, Gretta—the one who had made Jones his new and very expensive fake passport—
had
been killed. Bullets had hit her and her blood had sprayed, and for quite a few horrific moments Gina had been back on that hijacked airliner, back when the terrorists killed the pilot, as he fell onto the deck beside her, half of his head gone, as Alojzije Nabulsi battered and beat her, slamming himself inside of her in that act of violence and hatred that so wasn’t her fault.
Oh God, oh God, oh God, she was going to be sick.
“I don’t know who they were,” Molly was saying as Gina put her head down, praying that the waves of dizziness would subside. “He saved us, you know—the Italian man?”
Saved
them? Was she nuts?
Saved
them by taking them, at gunpoint, to a dingy, dank warehouse and making them sit on wooden pallets in silence for hours and hours while he went off to finalize arrangements for their luxury accommodations here in this metal box . . . ?
The biggest question, of course, was,
saved them for what
?
“He seemed apologetic,” Molly pointed out. “When he shut us in here. He said he doesn’t want to hurt us.”
“He’s lying,” Gina said, and her voice was like something out of
The Exorcist,
a raspy squawk, only Molly didn’t hear her.
She was counting aloud.
“Nineteen, twenty . . . Twenty-one,” Molly announced. “I’ve got twenty-one bottles of water, and a pack of adult diapers—thank God for small favors.”
Thank God? Thank
God
that their armed and dangerous Italian kidnapper had thrown a package of freaking adult diapers into this shipping crate, so that while he sent them God knows where, they’d be able to pee not
quite
in their pants?
Molly had been hit by disaster after disaster over the past few weeks, and yet her optimistic attitude continuously put Gina to shame. And Gina was usually no slouch herself in the positive thinking department.
“Water is good,” Molly continued. “Water implies that he wants us to arrive alive.”
Yeah, but what was going to happen to them when they were unpacked at their destination—wherever that was?
The fact that they were bait was a no-brainer. And bait only had to be kept fresh to a certain point.
Gina had been sure Italian Gun Man was going to kill them after taking that photograph of them next to the TV set, when they’d first arrived at the warehouse. Proof of life, it was called. Usually it was done with hostages holding a newspaper, but a live broadcast soccer game on cable TV apparently worked, too.
Sometimes it wasn’t proof of life. Sometimes it was proof of possession. And after that was established, hostages could become unnecessary.
There was a loud noise now—the sound of an engine being started. And then a lurch, and they were moving.
Heading God knows where.
Hurtling toward their fate.
Gina couldn’t help herself. She started to cry.
Molly shuffled toward her in the darkness, finding her and wrapping her arms around her. “Lord, Gina, I’m scared to death—and I can only imagine what this is like for you.”
“It’s like,” Gina said, wiping her face with her grubby hands, no doubt creating some real mud, “I’ve been sealed in a box.” Like she was already dead, but she just didn’t know it yet. Her voice wobbled. “I really miss Max.”
“I know, honey,” Molly said, hugging her. “Right now, even
I
miss Max, and I hold a grudge against him for hurting you.”
Gina laughed. It was shaky but it was laughter. “You’ve never held a grudge in your life.” Along with being ridiculously optimistic, Molly was quick to forgive. Jones—Grady—had once teased her by saying she’d give Hannibal Lecter a second chance. Which brought Gina back to a far less humorless subject.
“Don’t let Gun Man—the Italian guy—fool you,” she told her friend. “He doesn’t see us as people. We’re worms on his hook. If it suits his purpose to keep us alive, we’ll stay alive. If not . . . You know that saying, ‘When you expect the best of people, you’ll get the best . . . ?’ This is not one of those times.”
Molly was silent. She wasn’t usually silent when she disagreed, but this time she restrained herself. Gina knew if there had been light in there, the expression on her face would have given her away. Her rebuttal would start with “But . . .”
But he seems so soft-spoken. But he seems like a gentleman. But . . .
“I’m serious, Mol,” Gina said. “Don’t make friends with this guy.”
Because when he savagely beat and raped them before he finally killed them, it would be just that much worse.
“You’re not alone this time, Gina,” Molly told her. “We’re going to get through this. Together. Jones is going to come and—”
“Get himself killed,” Gina pointed out.
“Not if I have anything to say about that.” Conviction rang in Molly’s voice. “And not if you do, either.”
H
OTEL
E
LBE
H
OF
, H
AMBURG
, G
ERMANY
J
UNE
21, 2005
P
RESENT
D
AY
Jules stood back as Agent Jim Ulster knocked on the hotel room door again.
“You sure we got the right room?” Ulster asked his partner, a stocky, friendly faced woman that he called Goldie.
“This is the one,” Jules told them. “Eight-seventeen.”
Goldie—her real name was Vera Goldstein—double-checked her notepad. “Yes,” she verified. “It’s the room. Maybe Mr. Bhagat stepped out.”
“Unlikely,” Jules said.
“It
is
dinner time,” she said. “Even legends need to eat.”
“Trust me,” he said. “Max doesn’t stop for dinner even when the case he’s working on
isn’t
personal. He’s in there. But he may not want to be disturbed.”
“I heard he’s a little strange that way,” Goldie said. “That you need an engraved invitation to go into his office.”
Short, whip-thin, and radiating impatience, Ulster was the Ren to Goldie’s gentle Stimpy. The man didn’t want to stand around shooting the breeze. He knocked on the door again. Louder.
“No,” Jules said, “that’s not true. I mean, yes, when you talk to him, you better know exactly what you’re going to say. If you waste his time, he’ll let you know, but . . .”
“I really don’t think he’s here,” Ulster said, managing to check his watch, his cell phone, and surreptitiously adjust his balls in one swift movement.
And the door opened.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Max said. “I had a little accident, and I was getting cleaned up.”
Hello! Lying liar at twelve o’clock.
Goldie and Ulster were definitely fooled, blinded as they were by the shining glory of he-who-was-Max Bhagat. Although calling him
shining
in his current condition was a real stretch.
It was clear to Jules that someone had—quite recently—kicked the crap out of his legendary boss.
Recently enough so that his nose was still bleeding. Max had changed his shirt, sure, but his jacket and tie were noticeably absent. He held a washcloth up to his nose as the two agents introduced themselves like a pair of star-struck schoolgirls. Even Ulster was stammering now.
“I caught my foot in the electric cord for the lamp,” he told them, a charming, chatty Max Bhagat—lying his ass off. “Broke the damn thing. The lamp, not my nose. Thank God for that at least.”
It was definitely weird. With Max looking the way Max looked, there should have been a body or at least a very sore and aching loser, handcuffed to the pipe under the bathroom sink. And, as was appropriate in the law enforcement biz, when gathering for a meeting, post–body-accumulating, nose-bleed-inducing encounter, Max should have pointed to said loser and said, “Book ’em, Dano.”
Or, in this case, “Book ’em, Goldie.” Not blah, blah, lamp, blah, blah, nose.
As Jules stood there in the hall, he had a sudden vision of Max, as the completely insane but utterly delicious Edward Norton character in
Fight Club,
beating the hell out of himself in quite a few rounds of down and dirty, no rules, ultraviolent brawling.
Weird was putting it mildly.
And then . . . it got even weirder.
“Have you met Bill Jones, from the D.C. office?” Max asked Ulster and Goldstein as he stood back and let them into the room.
What the
who
?
But there was, indeed, a man in the room, sitting at the desk, using the hotel phone, as if he were taking a Very Important Call, hence his inability to answer the door.
Sure.
Most people sucked at faking a phone call, and Bill Jones was no exception.
He was tall, dark, and ruggedly handsome, and Jules had met him once before, only it wasn’t anywhere near the D.C. office. And the name he’d been using at the time sure as shit wasn’t Bill.
He hung up the phone, but as Max introduced him to Frisk’s agents, he didn’t get to his feet.
Possibly because Max had broken both his knees.
What was going on here?
“You’ve worked with Bill before, right, Cassidy?” Max had structured it as a question, but in truth, it was a direct order.
So Jules answered it the same way he answered all orders from his boss. “Yes, sir.” He held out his hand for Jones to shake. “Bill. How are you, buddy? Nice to see you again.”
And with that, Max was no longer the only liar in the room.
Yup, Billski had battered knuckles. And the shadow of a bruise was forming on the man’s jaw. And what
was
he holding onto with his left hand, hidden there in the pocket of his jacket?
Odds were it wasn’t his favorite Beanie Baby.
And, lookee over there, stuffed in yonder wastebasket. That wad of dark fabric had to be the tattered remains of Max’s suit jacket.
Torn and bloodied, no doubt, while tripping over a lamp cord.
Glad they got
that
all straightened out.
“You came all this way for nothing, I’m afraid,” Max—that gracious, charismatic, friendly Max—said as he smiled ruefully at Ulster and Goldstein.
It was kind of like stepping into an alternate universe. One where Mr. Spock had a beard, and Max was jovial.
“I managed to download the picture from the camera,” Happy-Max continued. “I already sent it in a J-peg file to my team back in the States. The good news is that’s one less thing for your team to do. I know Frisk’s pushing you hard—everyone’s tired.”
Jules headed toward the window, pretending to check out the early evening view of the city’s twinkly lights. He stepped over the broken lamp, leaning toward the glass to look down at the bustling street below.
His good friend Billy Jones didn’t like that he was over there at all. It meant he had to divide his attention between watching Jules and watching Max, who was still over on the other side of the room. It meant if he were going to discharge that Beanie Baby, he’d have to choose who to shoot first.