Authors: Kat Carlton
What
is going on? Who is targeting us?
I could drive my elbow backward, into her gut, and then try to get her in a choke hold, but it’s risky—not
only to myself but to other passengers on the train. If it were just her I had to contend with, I might try it, but the man she’s with also has his hand around something in his pocket, probably another gun.
I have no option but to do as she says. I move forward and then enter the car. It smells like stale cigarettes and spilled coffee.
“Sit!” the man says, flanking me.
I do. “What do you want?”
He ignores me. So does she. They avoid meeting my eyes.
I try again. “Who are you? Why are you doing this? What’s this about?”
No answer.
“Who do you work for?”
They stare at me, faces impassive.
Wonderful.
I have a brief surge of hope as a porter appears, his eyebrows raised. He gestures at me. “You find her, eh, your runaway daughter?”
The woman produces an effusive, grateful smile. “Oh, yes, thank you—”
I open my mouth to scream, “Help!” But the man sends a ferocious warning look my way, and I realize that they won’t hesitate to shoot the porter. He probably has a wife and kids . . . again, I don’t want to risk it. I can somehow get away from these two later. I know I can.
The man says gruffly to the porter, “Please—you will alert us if her no-good boyfriend or the idiot friend come this way? We would rather avoid an ugly scene.”
“Of course, Monsieur.
Tout de suite
.” He shoots me a disapproving glance.
Thanks, pal. Really, you couldn’t be more helpful. Couldn’t you ask for ID, at least? How do you know these two aren’t planning to kidnap me into sex slavery?
But I don’t say a word. I just hunch my shoulders and glare sullenly at all of them.
The porter whistles a tune as he walks away.
I assess the people who are holding me captive. The woman is brunette and wears an ugly printed scarf. She has dressed in a deliberately dowdy, gray sack dress and black tights, but under them she is lean and fit. I’d say she’s a runner, which is bad news for me. She’s got on serviceable shoes with rubber soles.
The man has closely cropped dishwater-blond hair, graying beard stubble, and pale eyes that are devoid of expression. The two of them seem neither intelligent nor stupid; just well trained to carry out someone’s orders.
I wonder about that someone—and try asking again.
Sack-Dress Woman tells me curtly to shut up.
Does the person they work for have Charlie?
I don’t think so. It doesn’t make sense that the kidnappers would demand that I spring this Gustav guy but then snatch me off a train en route to do that. Unless it was a ruse? But that doesn’t add up either . . . they could have grabbed me off a street in Paris.
So who are Sack-Dress and Beard-Stubble? And who’s calling the shots?
The train slows as we pull into Karlsruhe, the last stop
before Stuttgart, where we have to transfer to another train for Munich.
I wonder if Evan has fallen asleep—he certainly hasn’t come looking for me, and I’ve now been gone at least twenty minutes.
Sack-Dress grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet before propelling me out of the car, into a line of departing passengers, and then down the steps to the platform. Beard-Stubble is right behind me. I pretend to trip and fall—he grabs me and pulls me upright.
There’s a family of four waiting to board—two little boys and their parents. I reach back while Stubble is distracted and lift the flap of his coat so that the gun in his pocket is clearly visible.
One of the little boys points. “Papa! That man has a gun!”
“A gun?” repeats his brother loudly.
“Gun!” screams the mother. She grabs her sons and hits the pavement, while her husband crouches protectively over them.
Chaos erupts in the busy train station. People run screaming; a couple of German cops in khaki uniforms come running.
I take full advantage, kicking Stubble in the balls and twisting out of Sack-Dress’s grip. I sprint back to the train, which is about to pull out of the station.
But she’s got quick reflexes. She comes back after me, as Stubble rolls on the ground clutching himself.
I kick out and slam her in the chest, but she recovers and drops back to the next entrance. She makes it onto
the train at the same time I do, just on the opposite end of the car, which is deserted since a big group of people just got off.
Great.
I cannot give her time to pull that gun and aim it at me.
So I rush her like a small linebacker, then aim a roundhouse kick at her face. She dodges it, but it throws her off-balance. I aim another kick between her shoulder blades, and she goes facedown into the aisle.
Lick the floor and like it, lady.
I hurdle over her and erupt through the doors of the car, slamming into a startled porter.
“Hey!” He goes head over heels.
As he rights himself, brushing off his pants, Sack-Dress knocks him flying again.
“Herr Gott!”
He follows this with a series of curses.
I just keep running—until Sack-Dress body-slams me into the floor before I get to the doors of the next car. My turn to eat dirt.
Where is Evan when I need him? Or Matthis, who could at least stick out a foot and trip this woman? They can’t be more than two cars away—if that.
“Kincaid!”
I shriek. “Help!”
Her knee is in the small of my back, and she’s got me by the hair. I buck with all my might, ignoring the pain and the ripping sound. I dislodge her enough to roll onto my side, then chop the heel of my hand into her windpipe.
She falls back, clutches at it, and makes a gurgling noise.
Then, and only then, does Evan pop up out of nowhere.
There’s a waft of elegant aftershave, a blur of French blue poplin shirt, and then presto! Evan’s sitting astride her, her face is squashed into the floor, and he’s zip-tying her hands behind her back.
Zip ties? I lift an eyebrow. Really?
I scrape myself up and out of the aisle. I tear my gaze from his buns—hey, it was impossible not to notice them—and drop into a seat, panting. “Where did you get those?”
He turns his head, evaluates me in one laser-swift glance, then gives me a sweet, devastating smile. “The zip ties? They’re never missing from the Kinky Aid Kit. Didn’t you know?”
“The
what
?”
Matthis appears, his eyes wide and solemn behind the blue metallic frames of his glasses.
“Kincaid. Kinky Aid. Ha, ha. Get it?”
I close my eyes. “Seriously?”
When I open them again, Evan’s grin has widened.
“Are you okay?” Matthis ventures.
But I’m staring, furious, at what’s still clutched in Sack-Dress’s right fist. “Oh. My. God.” I put a hand to my hair, which feels all wrong. And my scalp is throbbing.
Evan winces, pries open the woman’s fingers, and removes a torn hank of my hair. “Ummm.” He extends it to me. “D’you want it back?”
I gape.
Matthis chokes.
The twice-flattened porter appears. “Are you all right?” He glances dubiously at my hair.
I do not even want to know what it looks like. . . .
“Ah. Uh,” mumbles Matthis. “I’m gonna suggest . . . maybe . . . a weave. You know, temporarily.”
This can’t be good.
I don’t have a lot of time to worry about it, though, because Evan gets off Sack-Dress and hauls her to her feet. I’m pleased to see that she doesn’t look so good, either. Her nose is broken and gushing blood. She’s got a black eye. She’s pretty banged up—and it’s not as if
her
hair is Oscar-worthy, either. It’s not pretty, but at least it’s not half ripped out.
Evan keeps a firm grip on her with one hand and pulls out his GI badge with the other. He shows it to the porter.
“Evan Kincaid. Junior officer with Interpol. We were simply going on holiday. This woman tried to kidnap and attack my friend here. Can you call a couple of other porters and take her into custody?”
Sack-Dress tries to break away from Evan, but he knocks her feet out from under her, gentleman that he is. At least he holds her upright—if it were up to me, I’d let her fall back onto her face.
The porter gets on his walkie-talkie thing. Within minutes, three other porters come running, and they hustle us all into a special first-class car, though they seem suspicious of Evan’s GI credentials. One of them gets a first aid kit. They clean Sack-Dress’s face and pack her nose, telling her to lean her head back. She refuses to look at me. Her hands are shaking.
I’m thinking this is weird, except I look at my own hands and they’re just as bad. I guess it’s adrenaline. A
different porter squats down next to me and tries to clean my face, but I tell him it’s not necessary and wave him away.
“Trust me, it’s necessary,” says Evan. He takes over. How is it that Evan has not a hair out of place and still smells like royalty? His aftershave must cost a thousand dollars an ounce.
He bites his lip as he takes my chin in his hand. I try to jerk away from him but find that I can’t. “Keep still,” he orders. Then, as if I’m three years old, he wipes my mouth. Really, the last time anyone did this, I was wearing pull-ups.
“Well,” he says, “you won’t need a collagen injection for a while.”
Huh?
He turns my head to inspect my hair and grins. “Matthis? About that weave you mentioned . . .”
“I don’t care what my hair looks like!” I say. “I only care about Charlie.”
“Okay,” Evan says, but he looks amused. “But you’ll need a hat or a wig.”
I guess I should probably look at the back of my head. “Give me a mirror, then.”
Everyone—all the porters, Matthis, and Evan—exchanges a glance.
“Right,” Evan says. “Get the girl to a mirror.”
The first porter points to a door right outside the car.
I get up and walk toward it, not without a feeling of dread. I’m no girlie girl, but everyone has a
little
vanity.
It’s very cramped inside the WC, and the light isn’t
great. But there’s enough for me to see that my mouth is swollen to the size of an inner tube. There are cuts and abrasions on my face, which despite Evan’s attempts, is still not clean.
I gingerly try to angle my head so that I can see the back of it, but my brain feels like its sloshing inside my skull. Then there’s a shout and a scuffle outside. A thump. A slam. Another shout.
I throw open the door just in time to see Sack-Dress hurl herself bodily off the train. Understand that I’m no fan of hers . . . but even I wince, horrified, as she bounces down the embankment and rolls toward the river we’re passing. Oh, my God! Her hands are still behind her back, zip-tied.
That doesn’t change as she hits the water like a sack of cement and sinks.
I don’t even realize it, but I’m screaming.
The porters are shouting too, and one of them gets on his comm unit to alert the engineer, but the train shows no signs of braking.
Evan hauls me away from the still-open door and back into the car. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, Kari,” he repeats.
“It’s not okay! They have to stop the train—someone’s got to pull her out of the water!”
“They can’t stop the train easily. Even if they did, by the time someone got to her it would be too late. And there may be other trains coming behind us on the same set of tracks.”
“But—but—”
“I’m sure the engineer has alerted the German police.”
He settles me onto a bench and rubs my arms.
“She’s going to drown!”
“Yes.” His gray-blue eyes are somber. I know he’s thinking about the fact that he put the zip ties on her wrists.
“She committed suicide.” I say it baldly.
He drags a hand over his face, then nods.
“Who is she? Why did she target me? Is she trying to bring me to whoever has Charlie? No—that doesn’t make sense. So there’s
another
person after us?”
Evan just looks at me. “I don’t know.”
“And why did she kill herself?
Why
?”
He shakes his head. “To some people, some organizations, failure is not an option. And she failed to bring you to whoever ordered your kidnapping. Maybe death is preferable to the consequences that await her.”
I think about that. About failure not being an option.
And I realize that it’s true for me as well. No matter what happens, no matter who tries to stop me, I will break Gustav Duvernay out . . . because failing Charlie isn’t an option. It’s unthinkable.
There is a lot of confusion onboard the train, needless to say. And off the train, once we get to Stuttgart. The first porter, the one who thought I was a runaway daughter, cannot seem to understand that I was actually being kidnapped by strangers.
“Your
maman
—she is the one who threw herself into the river?” he asks stupidly.
“She’s
not
my mother!” I say, for what seems like the tenth time.
“But regardless of who she is, you should send the
polizei
to pull her body out of the water,” Evan points out.
“Yes, yes, of course.” He mops at his brow with a handkerchief. Despite the chilly weather, he’s sweating profusely. “They have been dispatched.”
“You should have asked for the woman’s ID—and
his—before leaving me alone with those people,” I tell the porter.
“But you were already with them . . . I saw no need . . . you didn’t ask for help—” He flounders helplessly. Dark, wet circles are growing under the arms of his uniform.
“I didn’t ask for help because they had a gun jammed into my ribs.” My tone is pure acid.
“So you are a minor?” Another porter asks this question and demands to see our passports. “You are all minors?”
It goes on and on, the confusion.
Evan calls Interpol. To my surprise, he asks for someone I’ve never heard of instead of Rebecca; he speaks a language that I can’t even begin to interpret. It’s not French, not German. Perhaps it’s Dutch? Where did he learn that? I have no idea. But evidently the porters don’t speak it either, because they continue to scratch their butts and give us a hard time. Evan gives a sequence of numbers—a code?—to the person on the other end of the line and then ends the conversation.