by David Pepper
Tori took out her phone. “They’re still at the hotel.”
“Good,” Ned said. “What’s the plan now?”
“We need to grab our photos and get out of here. And, Ned, we can’t let them see you.”
“It looks like they’re leaving the—”
An explosion of cheers cut Tori off, fans leaping to their feet all around us, throwing their arms straight up into the air. The Green Bay quarterback sprinted twenty yards for a touchdown.
“So they left?” I asked Tori when things died down.
“Yes. It’ll take them about thirty minutes.”
Minutes later, Tori sent Ned another text. I’ll be there at 4:10.
He waited a few seconds, then texted back.
Great. I grabbed a booth towards the back. Close to the restrooms.
There was a line of booths along one wall, chock-full of Packers fans. Forcing Beauty and the Beast to head all the way back there would give us time to snap photos.
Perfect. I’m in my Wisconsin jersey. See you in a few.
“Where should I go?” Ned’s face was paler now than it had been in his apartment.
“There was a Subway a couple doors down. Wait there and stay away from the windows.”
“Okay.”
As Ned took a step toward the exit, a tall, skinny guy seated just beyond us leapt to his feet. Already jittery, Ned ducked the other way. But it was just a Packers interception, and when the defensive back ran it in for a touchdown, the place boomed.
“He’s a nervous little guy, isn’t he?” Tori asked as Ned recovered and walked out the front door.
“Yeah. But he’s also the only one they’ve seen.”
She glanced at her phone again. “They’re a few miles out. Where should we be when they get here?”
“Are you sure they didn’t get a good look at you as you drove?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
“Remember, they’re pros.”
She glared at me. “I’m sure.”
“Then stand near the main door when they walk in.” I scanned the room. Half the people were texting, especially women as their boyfriends watched the game. “Text me when they come in. I’ll take a photo before they get too close.”
“And what if they see you taking it?”
“They’ll be past you at that point, so run for it. Keep yourself safe.”
“But you’d be trapped back there,” she said, gesturing toward the bathroom.
She was right. There would definitely be no way out.
Groans erupted across the bar as the Green Bay running back absorbed a monster hit.
Tori chimed in seconds later. “They’re parking. Three blocks away.”
“Go time.”
She got up from the booth and walked toward the door, guys clearing the way like before. I pushed the other way, along the row of booths, guys not giving an inch. I stopped just before the men’s bathroom.
I think I see the Beast . . . Yes, here he comes.
Beauty?
Don’t see her.
Shit. We needed photos of them both.
The Beast walked in. Even in a crowd, his awful hair and large, round nose stuck out. I lifted my phone, lined up the shot, and zoomed in.
As I touched the button to snap the photo, a red object exploded across the phone’s screen. I looked up to see the biggest guy in the place, at least three hundred pounds, six-foot-six, and wearing a Wisconsin jersey, lumbering toward me, blocking the view.
I leaned to my left and opened a new line of sight, again capturing the Beast in the screen. I zoomed in further, and—wham! The pain shot through my left wrist as my phone flew to my right, bouncing hard off the wall before hitting the ground.
“Why the fuck are you taking a picture of me?” the giant yelled, the stench of beer and spicy wings exploding from his breath. The hand that had smacked my phone was now only inches from my face.
“I wasn’t tak—”
“Fucking pervert.” He shoved me into the wall, my left shoulder taking the brunt of the collision into the brick surface.
Typically, I would have pushed back. But neither this guy nor the timing was typical, so I didn’t say a word as he barreled past me to go to the bathroom. I leaned down and fumbled for my phone, clawing it off the ground on the third try. Fortunately, it wasn’t broken.
By the time I stood back up, the Beast was only yards from me, sending a tremor through my body. Taking a photo would give me away, so I stepped along the wall while holding my breath. We passed within inches of one another, then he ambled along the row of booths, glancing at the people seated in each. His right hand hovered around his waist, shooting my heart into overdrive.
My mind raced to revive our plan. Where could I go to grab the photo? Where was the woman? Should we abandon ship?
Out of the corner of my eye, a playful young couple on barstools answered my questions with the most common of modern activities.
I walked briskly to Tori, her alarmed eyes signaling that things weren’t going well.
“I didn’t get a photo yet. . . . What’s he doing?”
“Still checking out booths. He’s pissed. . . . Wait. He’s heading back this way.”
“Step to the left and look the other way, up at the TV. Same direction I’m looking.”
“Okay.”
My phone was still in camera mode. I held it out with my left hand, my arm fully outstretched. A television monitor appeared in the phone’s screen.
“What are you doing?” Tori asked.
“Hold on.” I hit the icon with the circular arrows, and we were now staring at ourselves, along with all the people within ten feet of our backs.
“Smile.” I snapped photos as fast I could.
Her quivering lips curled into a wide smile.
I kept snapping until the Beast appeared in the corner of the phone’s screen.
“Go, Packers,” I said in the drunkest tone I could muster. He stepped a few feet closer, and I tilted the camera to point it right at his face, between Tori’s and mine. I held the button down and it snapped a dozen rapid-fire photos before he wandered toward the center of the restaurant.
“Got him. Let’s get out of here.”
Tori raced for the door, then stopped short, blocking me.
“Keep go—”
“Jack. Look up.”
The dark-haired Beauty was darting into the bar.
Our expressions must have given us away, because she fixed her flinty eyes on us.
Then she reached down.
Tori lunged forward, her shoulder crashing into the underside of the woman’s jaw. The jarring crunch of bone hitting bone, and teeth likely shattering in the process, pierced the air as the woman’s head whipped straight back and the rest of her body careened, ass-first, onto the wet sidewalk—a rougher hit than any televised inside.
We sprinted past as she screamed in pain, hands grabbing at her mouth.
“Go left,” I yelled.
Tori raced down the sidewalk as I struggled to keep up.
As we veered around the corner two blocks from the sports bar, the woman shouted orders to her companion.
“Should we get Ned?” Tori asked without even a hitch in her breath.
“No time,” I said, huffing. “We’ll circle back in a few minutes.”
The Cruze came into view a block away, on the other side of the street. We ran diagonally toward it, dodging a pickup truck heading in our direction as we crossed the street. I unlocked it remotely and we jumped in and drove off.
“See if they’ve left yet.”
Tori looked down at her phone. But instead of typing, she glanced over at me, her lower lip quivering.
“Ned messaged me. . . . I mean, they did.”
“They? What do you mean?
”
She lifted her hand over her mouth.
“They got him. Somehow they got him. And they sent a photo to prove it.”
Tori’s eyes were glued to her phone. “They entered the highway, heading north. They must be heading back to the hotel.”
On the eastern edge of Madison, my huffing from the run finally easing, I took a right and headed for I-90.
“How in the world did they find him?” she asked.
There was no way they’d just spotted him at Subway.
“When they hacked his phone, they could have added malware to track it. So when Ned left for Subway, she followed the phone. He would’ve been safer staying near us.”
“Terrible. So what do we do now?”
The photo alone said it all: Ned strapped tightly into the back seat with rope, blindfolded, blood flowing from a gash in his forehead.
If we were going to save him, we had to do it fast. I had the accelerator floored.
“They texted again.” We had not yet responded to the photo. “‘Do you want your friend back?’ What do we say?”
“Tori, you gotta play hard to get.”
“Jack, we shouldn’t play at all. We need to help him. We should do what they want.”
“I’ve got some bad news for you. What they want is to clean up the mess as quickly as possible. They had their hands on their guns back there. They were ready to kill all of us, even in a crowd of kids. Your little move saved our lives. Any meeting we have . . . you, Ned, and I . . . we don’t walk out of it alive.”
Tori stared straight ahead, absorbing my words without moving.
“Tell them he’s not our friend.”
I hated even saying the words, but we had no choice. I’d learned painfully in recent years that the best way to avoid bloodshed was to stand strong and leverage whatever cards you held.
“Awful.” She typed on her phone for a few seconds, chewing on her lower lip.
“They say if that’s true, he won’t live much longer.”
“Tell them we’re fine with that.”
“Jack!”
“Tori, their goal is to find us. Killing Ned means they never will. We have to make this hard for them.”
My mind raced for a solution. I desperately wanted Ned back, but his captors were armed and we weren’t. Our best opportunity existed while they were on the move. Once in that hotel room, he’d be trapped, probably for good.
We passed a state patrol car, sirens on, sitting behind a car pulled over in the right berm. And that’s when the best solution became clear. So damn simple.
I picked up my phone and dialed three digits.
“Dane County 911,” a low-pitched woman’s voice said. “What is your emergency?”
“I’d like to report a kidnapping.”
After getting my name, location, and phone number—I made up a name—the dispatcher ran through a series of questions, after which I described the Range Rover, heading north on I-90, along with the license plate and basic descriptions of Beauty, the Beast, and Ned.
“Do you know any of the three?”
I hesitated.
“I do not. They dragged this little guy out of a Subway shop as we were leaving a sports bar. We followed as long as we could but they lost us. Oh, and the man was holding a gun to the victim’s back.” I didn’t want the cops to show up unprepared.
“Thank you. We’ll dispatch officers right away.” The line went dead.
Within minutes, a highway patrol car and sheriff’s car flew past us, sirens blaring. Then a local squad car entered the highway in front of us, sirens also lit up, followed a minute later by a highway patrol car speeding south, doing a 180 in an emergency lane, and disappearing the other way.
“Wow. The cavalry is on its way. How far ahead are they?”
Tori was still tracking them on her phone. “A couple miles. And they are absolutely flying. They’re already past the ho— Hold on, I’m getting a text.”
She waited a few seconds.
“Jack, they say we’ve made a big mistake. That they will kill Ned before they ever stop the car.”
They were losing their cool. “Ignore it. They won’t do it.” I couldn’t afford a rattled Tori.
“Hold on. Now they’ve stopped. But they’re still on the highway. The cops must’ve pulled them over.”
No way these two would simply pull over. “How far ahead?”
“I’d say three miles. They’re definitely no longer moving.”
A mile later, brake lights flashed in front of us as cars slowed. A minute after that, we came to a complete stop.
“Maybe another mile,” Tori said.
Another set of sirens blared from behind. But these were the longer, more gradual wails of fire engines as opposed to the patrol cars from before. In the coming minutes, three firetrucks and two ambulances flew past us, straddling the left lane and the left berm.
“Shit,” Tori said. “Do you think they crashed?”
A chill ran the length of my spine, but I said nothing.
We merged into the right lane and drove slowly forward, no more than fifty yards a minute. Tori kept waiting for another text from Ned’s number. Nothing.
Minutes later a plume of black smoke appeared in the distance, towering above the highway and answering her question.
Tori gasped. “Oh, God.”
The initial smoke didn’t capture the intensity of the fire up close. Underneath the high, vertical shafts of black smoke, thick gray vapors billowed across the center and left lanes of the highway, orange and red flames sparking and dancing throughout. Amid it all, the contours of an overturned semi stretched diagonally across two lanes of highway, its cab smashed into the berm dividing the north and south lanes of I-90.
And somewhere within that sickly gray and orange cloud was a Range Rover.
Well past the accident, three cars idled on the side of the road, their drivers gawking as the firefighters battled the blaze. After passing them, I pulled over and walked back to the car closest to the accident, the heat growing more stifling with every step.
“You see what happened?” I asked the driver, yelling over the roar of the fire and the low, whirring groan of the fire pumps.
“Yeah. I’ve never seen anything like it. A bunch of cops were chasing a Range Rover. He took off like a fighter jet—at least a hundred—almost collided with me, then tried to pass that semi. He hit the divider, bounced hard to the right and into the semi’s trailer, and that was that. Ran right into him. Total idiot.”
“Anyone make it out?”
He wiped sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve.
“The truck driver did, right before the rig blew. But the Range Rover hit the truck so hard, the entire top half of the car disintegrated. Then it flipped. My guess is they were dead before the explosion.”
“So no one’s gotten out?”
“No, sir.” He wiped his brow again. “No one’s getting out.”
CHAPTER 38
ALMATY, KAZAKHSTAN
Adnan was an oaf.”
Katrina shook her head as she spoke, walking through the airport terminal at her usual brisk pace. Natalie trailed a few feet behind.
“I have no doubt he was driving. What a waste.”
Katrina had always been skeptical of the Albanian contribution to the syndicate’s joint security apparatus—more muscle than brains. Fatima, on the other hand, had impressed her, especially during her time in Washington. The Syrian beauty never made mistakes. So Drac’s news that both had died in a high-speed chase on a Wisconsin highway darkened her mood.
“So their target was killed with them?” Natalie asked.
“Only one. There are others. And now we’re left with no knowledge of who they are.”
“Can we still find them?”
“Dra
c is working on that now. Someone called the police, so he’s starting there.”
They descended a flight of stairs to the lower floor of the terminal, which housed the airport’s lone baggage carousel. A nation’s baggage claims opened a window into its economy. So here in the capital of Kazakhstan, where a fortunate few ruled over legions in poverty, only a handful of Western-style suitcases circulated, far outnumbered by ratty duffel bags, overstuffed burlap sacks, and clear plastic bags stuffed with clothes and food.
Having flown privately, bags in hand, Katrina and Natalie kept walking until reaching a short man holding a white placard with Katrina’s name on it. Pulling their small travel bags behind him, the man led them to a black limousine parked in its own reserved space directly outside the terminal.
Ever since her first visit, she’d considered Almaty one the world’s great mountain metropolises. Its central city was an eclectic hodgepodge of Soviet-era buildings and palaces, mosques and cathedrals, mixed in with modern skyscrapers and needlelike towers piercing the sky. Framing that dynamic skyline on three sides were lush green foothills and snowcapped mountains.
After traversing the city, the limousine powered up those foothills before navigating a series of steeper switchbacks that ended at a thick iron gate. The limo driver waved at a small guardhouse to the left. Seconds later the gate whisked open.
“Welcome to the most spectacular home in Kazakhstan,” Katrina whispered to Natalie as they drove up the private road that offered the smoothest part of the entire ride.
Minutes later Katrina and Natalie found themselves in a dark library as ornate as Dyadya’s, sitting on opposite ends of an antique Victorian couch. Red velvet cushions pushed them each to the edge of the couch, forcing them to lean forward uncomfortably. Across from them, in a small chair made of the same dark hand-carved maple as the couch, sat a pint-sized and frail man, made to appear even smaller by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and wood-framed paintings surrounding him.
