Lockdown (17 page)

On the way, Lock unholstered his Sig, chambered a round and
then decocked it using the lever on the left of the pistol grip. Then he holstered it again. It left him ready to go. He did it every time he was about to walk through a door when he didn’t know for sure what lay on the other side and there was a chance it was something bad.

At the top of the stairs he stopped, took out his Gerber, and eased a section of painted-over wire away from the door frame. Cutting through it, he jammed the wire into his pocket before pushing open the door.

A solitary desk lamp cut an arc through the gloom. The smell was of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. An overweight elderly woman with her hair up in a bun sat behind a desk. She fumbled for the panic button.

Lock held up the sliver of wire he’d cut out from around the door frame. ‘It’s not working.’

There was a phone on the desk, but the woman made no move for it. She seemed remarkably composed, as if an armed man storming her office was an everyday occurrence. Lighting a fresh cigarette from the dying embers of the previous one, she sucked down on it, browning the filter with one drag, seemingly resigned to whatever was coming next.

‘What do you want? I’m busy.’

Lock reached inside his jacket and pulled out the picture of Natalya with her parents. He laid it on the desk in front of the woman. She glanced at it, then looked away.

‘So?’

‘You know her?’

She eyed him suspiciously. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘She’s dead. But before she died a little boy she was looking after was abducted. I’m trying to find him. And you’re going to help me.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He was getting nowhere fast. Sooner or later someone would
realize that a customer who’d gone to the men’s room hadn’t reappeared. Then one of the gorillas would come scouting.

He pulled out the letter of reference, placed that on the desk alongside the photograph and pointed to the signature. ‘This is you, isn’t it? You’re Jerry.’ He could see that right now she’d deny being in the same room as him, so he kept going. ‘Now, you can either answer my questions or I can turn this over to the FBI.’

‘It’s my name, but I didn’t sign it. My name’s spelled with an i not a y.’ She picked up the letter and took her time studying it. ‘She worked here. Until, maybe . . .’ She paused, making an effort to recall. ‘Five months ago. Then she left.’

There was a knock at the door. Then, a man’s voice. One of the bouncers. ‘Hey, Jerri, we need you downstairs.’

‘Answer him,’ Lock whispered.

‘Give me five.’

They listened as the man clumped back down the stairs. Then they heard him push open the door to the ladies’ room and bark something to one of the dancers.

Jerri dragged on her cigarette as Lock rifled through the files on her desk.

‘Listen, if I treated Natalya so bad, why did she come looking for her old job back?’

Lock looked up from the filing cabinet. ‘What?’

‘Didn’t know that, did you?’ Jerri said, a smirk passing across her face.

‘When was this?’

‘Let me think. A month, six weeks ago.’

‘Did she give a reason?’

Jerri blew a smoke ring and shrugged. ‘She didn’t say. But it’ll have been a man. Always is.’

‘She mention anyone in particular?’

‘Some guy called Brody, I think.’

‘Could it have been Cody?’

‘Yeah, might have been.’

‘Cody Parker?’

‘She just called him Cody.’

Shit
. Lock had been wrong. The guy wasn’t innocent, merely cool under pressure.

‘Did she say anything about animal rights?’

‘Animal what?’

Lock took that as a no.

‘You ever meet him?’

‘He might have picked her up once or twice.’

‘Was he older? Younger?’

‘Than her? Older. Listen, our five minutes is up. They’ll be coming back up here and there’ll be trouble.’

Right on cue there was another knock at the door. This one more insistent.

‘Jerri?’

Before she had a chance to respond the door opened and one of the bouncers got a face full of gun.

‘Relax,’ said Lock, ‘I was just leaving.’

The bouncer blanched. ‘OK, man. I ain’t gonna try and stop you.’

Lock pushed past him and headed down the stairs, taking them two at a time. In the bar, Tiffany was perched on Ty’s lap.

‘I gotta go,’ Ty told her.

She threw her arms around Ty’s neck. ‘Will you call me?’

‘Sure.’

Ty fell into step with Lock. Behind them they could hear the bouncer screaming into his cell phone as he careered down the stairs. ‘Yeah, he’s got a gun. I need someone here now!’

In the office, Jerri lit a fresh cigarette and cradled the phone
against her shoulder. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, blowing a perfect smoke ring and watching it slowly dissolve in front of her face. ‘But if I were you, I’d start closing this thing down fast.’

‘So we had him and we let him go,’ said Ty, pacing to the window of Lock’s living room and faking a punch at his own reflection. ‘If they’ve harmed that kid . . .’

Lock sat on the couch, his head in his hands, the tips of his right fingers worrying at his scar. ‘It might not be Cody, y’know.’

‘Ah, come on, Ryan. He knew Natalya, then magically she pops up as Josh Hulme’s nanny.’

‘Au pair,’ Lock corrected him.

‘Whatever.’

‘I guess we should call Frisk. Hand this back over to the Feds. People might not have wanted to cough up Parker when he was the Che Guevara of furry animals everywhere, but this might change his image.’

Lock pulled out his cell from the pouch on his belt. It buzzed in his hand. The prefix was for the Federal Plaza. ‘Speak of the devil.’ He flipped to answer.

‘What the hell are you playing at?’ The voice was unmistakeably that of Frisk.

‘Just the man I wanted to speak to.’

‘The hell with you, Lock.’

‘We know who has Josh Hulme.’

‘That’s great. You know who has his father too?’

‘What?’

Ty read Lock’s face. ‘Wassup?’

Lock waved him away. ‘Richard Hulme is with your guys, isn’t he?’

‘He was until about an hour ago.’

‘What happened?’

‘He left his apartment and now we can’t find him.’

Stafford Van Straten took some papers from an eight-hundred-dollar leather attaché case and laid them out on the back seat of the Hummer. ‘I spent most of the day negotiating with our insurance company,’ he said.

Richard looked down at the documents, a glazed expression on his face.

‘I managed to convince them that because there’s only been a short window between your terminating your employment and your decision to rejoin the company, they won’t void the policy which covers you in relation to kidnap for ransom. In other words, you’ll still be covered.’

Stafford smiled to himself. He would have made a great door-to-door salesman.

‘It wasn’t an easy negotiation under the circumstances. They’re placing a limit on any ransom of two million dollars. Usually they’d go to five. But I think we were lucky to get them to extend their cover at all, don’t you?’

Again, Richard said nothing.

‘In the event that any ransom that’s paid exceeds two million
dollars, Meditech have agreed to cover the excess beyond two to the usual ceiling of five. We can write it off against tax, in any case.’

Finally, Richard looked up at him. ‘This is my son’s life you’re putting a figure on.’

Stafford loosened his tie, undid the top button of his shirt. ‘I’m sorry, Richard. I don’t mean it to sound so clinical. I’m not really the best guy when it comes to dealing with emotions. I tend to suppress things, you know. It’s easier for me to try to fix things than worry about why they went wrong in the first place. I understand that you’d give anything to get him back.’ He eased a contract across the seat with the fingertips of his right hand.

Richard looked down at the thick sheaf of laser-printed heavy bond paper. ‘What’s this?’

‘Well, in order for this to work you have to be in our employ for at least the next twelve months. Any less and the insurance company would void the policy again. Along with the cover for other employees. Which in turn would make it near impossible for us to be insured with anyone else. And
that
would present major difficulties, especially for our overseas operations. Major difficulties for you too, as you’d be liable for any ransom. And I’m guessing if you had a spare few million lying around we wouldn’t be here now. You do see what I’m saying here, Richard, don’t you?’

Richard hesitated, then reached out for the contract. He began to flip through it, looking for where his signature was required.

‘It’s all fairly standard stuff,’ Stafford said quickly, handing him a Mont Blanc. ‘All the usual caveats, in particular with regard to the commercial sensitivity of your work.’

Richard stopped flipping. ‘I won’t go back to using animals.’

‘And neither will we. Our word is our bond on that issue.’

Richard flicked to the last page and signed his name. Stafford handed him the copy. He signed that as well.

‘You’re talking about a ransom,’ Richard said, ‘but there hasn’t been any demand yet.’

‘That’s not entirely true.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We had to resolve some other issues first. Before we told you.’

For a moment Stafford thought Richard was going to stab him through the throat with the pen.

‘The kidnappers have contacted you?’

‘They were obviously confused about your status with the company. Didn’t you think it was strange when you didn’t receive any demand?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Richard sounded disbelieving.

‘If we had, you’d have told the FBI, and where would that have gotten us? Listen, Richard, you’ve been a bit of a loose cannon for the company. Even prior to all this. All your objections to the animal testing didn’t go down well with senior management.’

‘It’s bad science. The genetic structure of a primate isn’t close enough for something of this nature. Fine if you want to come up with something to treat, say, diabetes, but there’s no margin of error with these agents.’

Stafford cut him off. It was tough love time. ‘Well, while you were busy baring your soul on national TV, I was hard at work trying to get the company to sort out this damn mess. The people who have your son have made it plain they don’t want news of any ransom demand getting to the FBI. Nor do we. How many kids of our employees would be snatched if this were made public? Millions of dollars involved. Every scumbag loser in the country would be looking to repeat the trick. Every child whose parents were employed by a major corporation would be a target. Do you want that?’

‘Of course not. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.’

‘Good. So no telling anyone else. Especially not the FBI. If they find out, they’ll block it, and your son will likely die.’

‘How can we be sure he’s still alive?’

‘Proof of life?’

Richard nodded.

Stafford reached back into his smart leather attaché case and retrieved a clear plastic bag with a bright blue Ziploc sealer at the top. Inside were four locks of brown hair. ‘We’ve had it analysed using our own labs. It’s definitely Josh’s. And they sent us this.’

Aware that a Polaroid avoided any suspicion that the image had been doctored, Stafford produced a white-edged snap, and passed it to Richard. In it, Josh stood, blinking against the flash, hair shorn and coloured, holding a two-day-old copy of the
New York Post
.

‘Oh Jesus. My son. What have they done to him?’ said Richard, breaking down at last.

Close to midnight, lights still shone from inside the Korean deli. A pool of hard commercial reality illuminating the ‘For Lease’ sign.

‘This’ll only take a minute,’ Lock said, pushing open the door.

‘You could just send a card,’ Ty objected.

On the way back to headquarters they’d got word from Carrie that the old Korean man hadn’t made it, that his heart had stopped working.

His daughter was behind the counter. She stiffened as Lock walked in. Even more so when Ty followed in his wake. Lock sighed: some things in the city never changed.

He took off his ball cap and held it against his chest. ‘I’m sorry about your father.’

She looked away, grief still catching her unawares. Tears welled. Ty studied the ground.

‘That’s all we came to say, really.’

‘Thank you.’

They started back to the door.

‘Wait,’ she said, moving from behind the counter. ‘My father thought you were a hero. You know we’d been robbed once before.
And people did nothing. Just stood there and watched it happen.’

‘Have the police said anything about the men who broke in?’

‘They’ve asked about the people who were doing the protests down the street.’

‘That figures.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Doesn’t matter. When the shooters came in, what did they say?’

‘They didn’t say anything.’

‘Nothing at all? Not even “get down” or “don’t move”?’

‘They gave us each a note.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Instructions on a piece of paper. The one they gave my father was in Korean.’

Lock felt suddenly wide awake. Ty, who had picked up a newspaper to kill time, put it back on the rack.

‘And what did it say?’

‘Just told us what to do.’

‘And the notes were definitely written out in Korean?’

‘And English. Yes.’

‘Did you tell the police this?’

‘Of course.’

‘And what did they say?’

‘Nothing. Why?’

‘Did you give them the notes?’

‘The men didn’t leave them behind.’

Lock looked at Ty, both thinking the same thing. They told her again how sorry they were to hear about her father’s passing and left.

A civilian cop wouldn’t have made the connection. To him or her it would just have been a neat trick, perhaps a way of making sure that the victim didn’t pick out an accent. But to Lock and Ty the written instructions meant something else. Something heavy.

In Iraq, when military patrols conducted raids on houses where they didn’t have access to a local interpreter, they used cards written out in all the local dialects. They relied on the fact that the Iraqi population was an educated one, and that although literacy levels were high, it wasn’t guaranteed that people could speak English. They also knew that a failure to understand instructions led to misunderstanding, and misunderstandings led to death. So the cards were brought in.