by a b
Ransom X
I. B. Holder
Ransom X
Copyright 2009 I. B. Holder
All Rights Reserved
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Smashwords Edition 1. 2 June 2010
Special thanks to Jenna for her skills, time, and generosity.
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Prologue
A group of men took their positions around a young woman. They wore colored costumes all shades of the rainbow. From afar with bright stage lights burning around them, this pinwheel effect made it look like the set of a children’s show. Up close, however, it was pornography. Not the polite kind that connoisseurs of Playboy imagined the Hooters’ girls engaging in on their off days. It was the kind that made them flinch, quickly look away, and then more often than not, look back again.
On the woman’s face was a mask that looked like a boxer’s training helmet. She was on all fours on top of a wooden crate, wrapped in a skimpy leatherette costume that suggested the sluttiest side of biker chic along with the sensibility of washable attire. This business was not the place for any natural materials or fibers.
A single wall-mounted speaker in the room crackled into life through a charge of static and feedback. The intercom cast out a voice with a sadistic quality, stripping words down into metallic fragments. If the voice had either warmth or breath when it left the lips of the person speaking into the microphone, it was long gone by the time it entered the room through the frayed mesh speaker cover. It sent chills down the girl’s spine as she looked at the one-way glass separating her from the speaker in the control booth. She had come to think of the “Controller” as the local representative of Hell on earth.
“We’re live in ten seconds.” It didn’t sound like a threat, but the men dressed in the costumes reacted as if it were.
They scurried into position around the girl, her eyes darting everywhere looking for a seam in reality where she might escape; it was impossible, like trying to focus on individual raindrops, never quite settling on one before the opportunity vanished. The men all wore vinyl coverings, painted onto their fat or slender, squat or tall bodies sinking into the folds or pulling over the muscles like a second skin. The purple one spoke to her in a growl.
“This is something in the business we call sky diving.” They pulled her into a position where her legs and arms were spread out like a skydiver’s, her stomach resting on the crate. “It’s supposed to be a real trip, but real pleasurable for the men.” A grin widened across his violet face. “Isn’t that always the way it is?”
As soon as the intercourse started, he kicked the crate out from under her and she hung suspended, she was now ‘sky diving’.
The yellow one spoke, “I actually heard from a girl that this wasn’t that bad.”
Green responded, “I don’t care what your mother told you.”
Their laughter filled the room. The girl’s eyes began to water. The true professionals in the industry learned how to relieve the strain by shifting some of their weight onto the stomach of the man angled beneath, but this girl was no professional.
In fact, up until two weeks ago she hadn’t even seen images like the one she was currently caught up in, except on a television screen at a frat party in college. She was way out of place, out of her depth back then; how far and foreign from any depth she felt now. She was an unwilling participant, having been abducted ten days before, as she was returning home from a rally. She had been protesting the unethical treatment of animals. The irony was not lost on this sharp graduate student. She tried to find further meaning in what was happening to her, but her mind quickly slipped back into the body’s hell. The laughter all around her made her retreat further inside where her boiling anger was a ruby contrast to the fading white pale of her skin.
A barked command from the speaker, and the levity was turned off, a tap gone suddenly dry as the metallic voice re-entered the room. “Shut your fucking mouths - everyone who can. The audience doesn’t want to see your mouths moving.”
The controller knew what the audience wanted. He was the one behind the glass, the mastermind of a sustainable, profitable abduction scheme of which the financial rewards were approaching the point of unbelievable. He was also almost completely anonymous, or so he believed, as he sat behind a bank of monitors skimming the camera angles along the girl’s body. He watched all of the monitors at once. He somehow always knew what men wanted to see, his lean fingers punched the keys on a control panel, switching between cameras and broadcasting the images to his waiting customers.
He glanced at an open web page where the action in front of him came streaming across the net on a ten second delay. This was not a simple abduction; it was a marketing enterprise. The tender was sex, fear and pain - who could possibly get enough? A glint in the eye of the controller hinted at an internal deception - he was careful not to let himself identify which of the elements of his sex show he most preferred. The acid in his throat threatened to come up into his mouth when he spoke to the “actors” in the room. He kept them moving just like the cameras. The audience loved change.
The broadcast he was producing was on transmit only and to protected sources, making the direct risk of discovery slight. He’d considered the statistical probability of getting caught and his estimates fed his arrogance. He wasn’t a kidnapper. The controller didn’t demand ransom for the girl’s return; there was no drop, and nothing to be traced back to them.
The ransom came from the accounts of the perverts of the world. Nobody ever went broke marketing to that segment of society. The controller punched up another one of the websites that marketed his video feed; live in progress, for ten dollars or DVD compilation of 24 hours for fifteen. The webmaster had gone so far as to post a scan of the police report of the abduction alongside the target goal or ransom at which the girl would be released. A graphic indicated the ransom progress, and right now, she was at 65 percent. She’d started out strong, and sales from her hometown drove her into the territory of twenty percent after a few days, but business had slacked off recently.
The man in the booth knew why; the girl was angry, always requiring forced situations. There was only so much market for that. People wanted to see her change.
He zoomed the camera shot in on her eyes. She hadn’t changed since she’d walked in that room for the first time. Anger, unfiltered by the mask of civility, burned in her eyes. He was as tired of her anger as the customers were, but instead of being frustrated, he practically quivered with anticipation. If she did not meet her ransom, she would be his. He would give her every chance, put her in every position to make the required amount of money, but he secretly wanted her to fail.
Two hours later the girl stood in the room apparently alone, when an arm reached into the pool of light and slipped under her shoulder. She looked at him and threw her arms around him. “Blue.”
Blue was not involved in the sex acts. For whatever reason, he was charged with taking care of the girls. He quieted her gently, adding, “You’re way behind dear, we need to do everything we can, there’s only two days left.” He saw her eyes sink inward, there was little left for her to give. He quickly corrected his course, “But we’ll do it. We’ll get you out early I predict.”
“Really?” She brightened, “Where am I?”
“Close.” A noise in the control room and she pulled closer to Blue, expecting the controller’s voice would uncoil and strike out at her like a snake. She kept her distance from the box speaker carving an arc
shuffling toward the door.
“Does he ever come out?”
Blue looked at the mirrored glass with an odd look, “you don’t want him to.”
She stood between him and the mirror cutting off his reflection and replacing his face with hers inches in front of him. “Thank you – for taking care of me.” She looked for a moment every bit as beautiful and innocent as the girl next door, provided that one lives in a neighborhood where there is a girl next door who has the time and resources to be wholesome and idealistic. They took a few halting steps for the door, then her body shook with a new thought. “Will I ever meet him?” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and let the stray strands fall into her eyes.
Blue clicked his teeth like he was urging on a horse, and smiled.
As it turned out, she was fifteen percent below target on the last day of her captivity, and she did get to meet the man in the control room.
Her body was found two days later after an anonymous tip. Her eyes remained fixed on an imaginary point far beyond where they could have seen, features etched in disbelief. Still beautiful, but angry no longer.
Chapter 1 Key
A sudden urgency pulsed through Legacy’s body; it was like someone had called his number and he had been waiting for a long time. He wasn’t in a waiting room; the stark but serviceable area around him was his basement office at the FBI building in Alexandria, Virginia. It was 4:30 and almost time to leave. The sharp feeling reasserted itself, confirming that there was something that needed his attention. He clicked his knuckles together in an act of concentration he’d used longer than he could remember. His fists came together and his muscular forearms began a contest. The stress on the joints in his hands was audible. His eyes searched over the desk. He hadn’t followed up on the one case that was farthest from the trash.
The brass nameplate on the door said Martin Legacy, Special Services, FBI. But that did very little to describe the man who had occupied the basement room for just over five years.
A better indicator of his personality might be the music that perpetually played in the background: a dissonant ringing that churned on for hours until unexpectedly it would erupt into a beautifully crafted and complex melody before falling apart again. The hallways around his office were famous for complaints of just having to pass his doorway and hear the racket – the workers couldn’t believe that anyone could possibly choose to be around that noise day in and day out.
The tapes were from a collection of unedited studio recordings with savant musicians. It was the kind of thing that one might find playing briefly in a psychology conference. The patients playing the music had a condition that pushed them so far into their own minds that they communicated solely through music and organized their thoughts into tones, melodies and cadence. Legacy claimed that the noise did two things: it helped him think, and it kept others away. The flat, expressionless way he would relate the two results gave nothing away as to which he valued more.
Legacy scanned his broad mahogany desk searching for the item that he’d been waiting for months. An old paracentric key was the only tangible connection between living criminal and victims long dead.
A case as cold as the late autumn breeze that blew down the streets of northern Virginia had one last gasp of air because of Legacy. The crime had been committed over twelve years ago. At that time Legacy had been in the military – leading a much different life than now. The rigid discipline of his former life had almost completely vanished.
Legacy considered organization in its traditional form to be a hindrance to his pursuit of understanding human motives, and even when pushed to organization by the necessity of his job, his efforts were less than inspired. He had marked out five sections on his desk with masking tape; each area was home to a wide array of pictures, police documents, press clippings and evidence from a single case plucked from the archives. He kept his least favorite case to the far left side of his desk and had been known to sweep an entire docket into an abnormally wide trashcan, which resided just below.
A special janitor was assigned to the office, and all of the papers that landed in the bin were processed and returned to evidence files. Legacy had no concept of the web of special treatment that surrounded him, but his breakthrough moments were enough to justify any unreasonable fuss. His genius made the world around him bend and flex to meet his needs.
After exasperating seconds of complete helpless searching, he saw something foreign on top of his phone, something he’d never dream of using.
A goldenrod sticky note read, “Check your inbox and enjoy the coffee.”
The inbox, how could that possibly be of use to anyone? Legacy never checked his inbox; the interdepartmental, departmental, cross-agency, internal external memo pipeline was a direct connection into the inane bureaucracy he considered functionally useless. Yet today, sitting on top of a stack of papers, most of them marked “urgent”, was an envelope marked in block letters LOCKSMITH.
Legacy gently slid the key out of the manila housing and felt the weight on his fingers. The original he’d formed in his mind, long ago, would have been brass. The duplicate that pressed against his skin was a clean silver-plated composite metal. Legacy was prone to distraction. His mind wanted to debate the origin of the metal that he weighed in his hand – but then, he heard a single beep of his watch and came back to the present moment. Five o’clock, not much time.
How had the delivery of this key slipped past him during the day? He quickly went over all of the comings and goings into his office that day. Eleven twenty-five, the regional director had entered and asked him something; it hadn’t registered of importance, he hadn’t even replied. The director got impatient and left seven minutes later. One twenty-five, someone had entered and spoke to him, couldn’t recall what. Random comings and goings of no distinction until someone had entered and set a cup of coffee, prepared exactly how he liked it on the desk. He picked up the cup and tasted the jet-black liquid, now cold, and deduced that the key must have come in with the coffee. There had been no other interruptions during the day. The internal phone had rung, but Legacy never answered the phone. His taste buds worked over the coffee until he decided that it was exactly room temperature, 72 degrees, and that enough sugar had fallen out of the solution to fix a time on the delivery. The key had been there for just over four hours.
A melody emerged from the piano clanging in the background interrupting his train of thought, a sweet harmonic sound that died as suddenly as it came to life. Legacy turned to the tape player with an uncharacteristic look of complete engagement.
He thought about how in the regular world people respond to people and leave background music in a place of inconsequence. Legacy’s experience was the opposite. He thought of all the people who had passed through his office today. Background music held his full attention, and the sounds that most people placed great importance upon were akin to the stroke of a graphite point across an interoffice memo. They meant little or nothing at all.
The key Legacy was holding in his hand was where worlds overlapped. It meant the end of a search for a killer who left absolutely no trail of evidence back to himself, and it meant the end of Legacy’s involvement in the case. It was the precipice of discovery, and even set back four hours by the interference of the inbox, it felt immediate.
As Legacy reached across the table, the cuffs on his suit started to ride up revealing two burn scars on top of his wrists. These were the cause of many discussions, and even appeared in his psych file. He always answered any questions with a blunt statement “they were self inflicted” and depending on who was asking he’d add “I’ve put others through worse, much worse.”
His hand found what it was looking for. He pulled out an old rusted sea captain’s lock from a plastic bag. On the label included with the lock it stated, “Slain Couple, Barbaric Discovery Bound and Gagged”
He paused, thinking about how barbarians never would waste their time on such deviant behavior. Barbarians had
a clean, brutal way of life that didn’t offer much time for perverse fantasy. The minute a barbarian started planning the elaborate death of two people, he’d get his throat slit for thinking small.
Fifteen minutes passed. The key was now warm in his left hand, and the lock had rusted imperceptibly more. He needed to put his wandering mind to better use, a quick review. Legacy looked again at the folder that contained the documents on the case. A note on the front page in clear, official handwriting read, “this one isn’t going to be easy.” He began to draw his hands together; the key would either fit the lock or not, and it would be over. He looked at the clock and started packing up the file.
He remembered vaguely where it all belonged, a long filing cabinet marked “Fridge.”
The Fridge was the area where the coldest cases got their last official stamp of final review. They certainly never got solved. That was until Legacy came to preside over the Fridge. The resolution rate was something over ten percent for his predecessor, and that figure included cases that were resolved by confession or reclassification while sitting in the Fridge. Not all crimes stay crimes, almost five percent become accidents, or acts without any consequence. The regional director, prone to simplifying, called those cases AWACs.
