by David Archer
“Sarah, they were there to try to rescue Cinderella. As I told you all before you left, there's nothing more we can do. The Secretary of State will have to disavow Noah and Marco as soon as we’re officially notified of their capture, probably before tomorrow morning. I left orders for you and Neil to be returned here if this should happen.”
“Screw your orders,” Sarah said. “I'm not coming back without Noah and the rest. Now, tell me what I can do.”
“There's nothing you can do,” Allison said firmly. “I cannot commit any more assets, and there’s no way you could manage any kind of rescue on your own. You'll return to Neverland on the next available diplomatic flight and wait for reassignment. Those are your orders, Mrs. Wolf, and I expect you to obey them.”
Sarah slammed the receiver down and turned to Neil. “She says there’s nothing we can do. We’re supposed to go back tomorrow.” She looked at Carson. “Could we have a few minutes alone, please?”
Carson started to speak, but then simply nodded and left the room. Sarah immediately went to Neil and put her arms around him, as she whispered into his ear.
“Okay, you’re doing great,” she whispered into his ear. “Stay focused, because we are not going back without them. We work the plan Noah came up with; I don’t know how we're going to survive this, but we're sticking to the plan. Are you with me?”
“Absolutely,” Neil whispered back. “I can’t really think clearly right now, so you're in charge. What do we do next?”
“We get the hell out of here, that's what. Let’s go.”
Neil grabbed his computer and tucked it under his arm while Sarah opened the door and peeked out into the hallway. There was no one in sight, so she motioned for him to follow and headed toward the rear door. She had parked the car back there, but Carson hadn’t taken the key from her.
They walked confidently, as if they knew exactly where they were going, and the few people who saw them paid no attention. The back door was not locked because it was inside the embassy perimeter, so they walked out without any difficulty. The Toyota she had been driving was right where she had left it, and they got into it quickly.
Sarah started it up and headed for the gate, where the security guard recognized the car. His job was to keep unauthorized vehicles out, and it never occurred to him that this one should not be leaving. He raised the crossbar and waved as they drove through, and Sarah waved back with a smile.
She drove directly to the hotel and left the car running with Neil in it as she hurried up to the room and grabbed their bags. A bellman politely provided a baggage cart and pushed it down for her, then helped her load the bags into the trunk and back seat of the small car. She thanked him profusely, shoving a wad of Russian currency into his hand, then got behind the wheel and drove away. They were away from the hotel for less than six minutes before the first Embassy security officer arrived there looking for them.
“You know we're on our own, right?” Neil asked. “The Dragon Lady is going to have our hides. They’ll have alerts out for us within an hour, and let’s face it, they know what we're driving.”
“Not for long,” Sarah said. She whipped the car into a parking lot outside a shopping center, told Neil to wait and got out. He watched her walking along the line of cars for a minute, but then she got into a Lifan sedan. She fumbled with it for a few seconds, then backed it out of its parking spot and drove back to the Toyota.
Neil grabbed the bags from the back seat while Sarah got the ones out of the trunk. They stuffed them into the Lifan and drove out of the dark parking lot as quickly as they could without drawing attention to themselves.
“This will help for a few hours,” Sarah said. “What we've got to do now is get a place to operate from, but they can track our mission credit cards. Do you have any Russian currency? I used what I had to tip the bellman back there.”
Neil shook his head. “No, but that isn’t that big a problem.” He opened up his computer and busied himself for a couple of minutes. When he looked up again, it was with a smile. “One of the perks of being a hacker is knowing some of the nasty little tricks the banks don’t want you to know. I just reassigned our card numbers to a bank account that isn’t going to be noticed. Neverland won’t be notified of any transactions, because the money isn’t coming out of their accounts. Since nothing will show up there, I don’t believe anyone will think to check any deeper.”
Sarah laughed. “Smooth,” she said. “Still, I think we should hit some ATMs and get cash. We need a room, someplace to base ourselves out of while we figure out what to do.”
“I can solve that problem, too,” Neil said. “There are a dozen different companies that lease fully furnished houses through the Internet here in Moscow. I can get us one now, and it will give me the code we need to get the key out of the lockbox on the house. And don’t worry, I'll charge them off to Amazon or some other big company. It will be at least a month before they notice, so that’ll give us plenty of time.”
“Do it, then. We need to get started working on the plan.”
Fifteen minutes later, Neil gave her an address. She punched it into the navigation app on her phone, then followed the directions. After only a few minutes more, they pulled up in front of a small bungalow and Neil retrieved the key from the lockbox and opened the door. The two of them carried in the bags, and then Sarah put the car behind the house.
“What about our phones? Can they track us with them?”
Neil grinned. “Not anymore,” he said. “I thought of that when I thought about the credit cards. I got into the system and changed the electronic serial numbers, then assigned new phone numbers to them. It's almost the same numbers we had, but I added fourteen to the last two digits. It’d take days for anyone to figure it out, so we can use the phones for now.”
“Good. Why don’t you lay down and get some rest, I've got a couple of calls to make.” She sat down in the living room chair while Neil laid on the sofa, then took out her phone and took a deep breath before she dialed a number.
A woman answered in a very sleepy voice. “Hello?”
“I'm probably the last person in the world you ever expected to get a call from,” Sarah said, “but I need your help.”
The woman seemed to be making an effort to wake herself. “Who is this?”
“Mrs. Camelot,” Sarah said. “Hello, Monique.”
Monica Lord, formerly known as Monique in political circles, gave a soft chuckle. “Well, you're right,” she said. “I certainly never expected you to call me. Show up at my door and blow my head off, maybe, but a phone call is a definite surprise. May I ask what prompted it?”
“That's pretty simple,” Sarah said. “Camelot has been captured, and you're going to help me get him back.”
“Hold on,” Monica said. “My husband is sleeping, let me go into another room so we can speak more clearly.” Sarah waited for about a minute, and then she came back on the line. “Okay, tell me everything you can about what’s going on.”
Sarah quickly explained about the mission to rescue Team Cinderella, and how they had planned to snatch them when they were being transported to Red Square for execution. She told about the plan to steal the execution schedule and how it had proved impossible, and then she confessed that she had defied orders to try to pull off the unlikely rescue plan Noah had concocted.
“Well,” Monica said when she was finished. “You have definitely got yourself in a mess. The question is, what do you expect me to do?”
“Look, we know you have contacts in Russia,” Sarah said. “I need you to get me men and equipment, I need information, I need anything and everything you can possibly do to help me save my husband and the rest of them. Maybe you've forgotten that Noah was supposed to kill you, that it was him who convinced Allison that you're more valuable alive. Don’t you think you owe him something for that?”
“I owe him my life,” Monica said. “On the other hand, you seem to have forgotten that your bosses monitor everything I do.
Do you think they’ll miss this phone call?”
“I can take care of that,” Sarah said. “Neil is here with me, and I'm pretty sure he can get in and delete this part of the recording before anybody sees it. I know he’s done that before, so I think he can do it again.”
Neil sat up suddenly at the mention of his name, smiled at Sarah and nodded. He pulled his computer closer on the coffee table and started typing.
“He’s already working on that now,” Sarah said. “Everything we talk about and everything you do for me will be under the table. Now, can I count on you?”
Monica was quiet for a moment, then she sighed. “Can your whiz kid just turn the monitor off for a while? Just a few days, that's all I'm asking for. Yes, I'm willing to help you, but I can’t do it with them looking over my shoulder, and I can’t do it from here.”
Sarah told her to wait, then muted the phone and repeated the question to Neil, and he looked at her. “I can do it,” he said, “but can we trust her?”
“I don’t think we have any choice,” Sarah said. “Like Noah said, she’s the only person we can get to who has the kind of connections we're going to need.”
Neil looked at his computer for a moment, then typed something into it. His hand hovered over the enter key for a moment, and then pressed it decisively. He looked up at Sarah. “Done,” he said. “I've turned it completely off for the next seven days. I also locked it to an encrypted password, so it would take them more than that to undo it in any case.”
Sarah unmuted the phone. “You're off the leash for seven days,” she said. “Now, what can you do for me?”
“You're in Moscow?” Monica asked.
“Yes.”
“I have a distributorship there for my beauty products. If I move quickly, I can be there within twelve hours. Is this number on my caller ID valid?”
“Yes, it is,” Sarah said. “But why do you need to come here?”
“Because somebody has got to keep the two of you from getting yourselves killed,” Monica said. “Get some sleep, I'll call you as soon as I arrive.”
“All right,” Sarah said. “Don’t disappoint me, Monique. I'm quite capable of putting that bullet into your head if you do.”
“Get some sleep, Sarah. I'll talk to you tomorrow.” The line went dead and Sarah put the phone on the coffee table.
“She’s coming here,” Sarah said to Neil. “I'm just as nervous about trusting her as you are, but there’s nobody else we can turn to. I'm going to get some sleep, and I suggest you do the same.”
She got up from the chair and went to one of the two bedrooms, stripped out of her clothes and climbed under the covers. Her mind raced for several minutes, thinking of imaginative, probably far-fetched ways to effect a rescue, but at last she drifted off to sleep.
* * * * *
Noah and Marco had been taken into an interrogation room and questioned for almost an hour, but neither of them would give any answers. An FSB captain named Fedorov finally got tired of looking into their blank faces and they were escorted deeper into the prison. They were forced to change clothes and then placed into cells.
Noah laid down and went to sleep, but Marco was too overstressed. He sat on the bunk in his cell, just thinking, and it was only after his mind began to slow down that he heard the noise.
At first, he thought there was an animal in his cell, but then he realized that the noise seemed to have a rhythm to it. It came and went, a series of taps and scratches, and it slowly dawned on him that what he was hearing was Morse code. A tap was a dot, which meant a scratch was a dash.
Marco had learned Morse code many years earlier, as a teenager interested in ham radio, but he was pretty rusty. He listened to the sounds closely and used the pad and pencil from the table to write what he thought he was hearing.
Tap, scratch, scratch. That, he thought, was a W.
Four dots. H.
Three dashes. That was an O.
The sequence began to repeat, and Marco realized that someone was asking who had been brought in. Knowing that Jenny and her team were also being held somewhere in the prison, he decided to take the chance and respond. He used the back of the pencil to tap and scratch.
Two dashes, dot dash, dot dash dot, dash dot dash dot, three dashes. MARCO.
A moment later, as the reply started to come in, he realized that it was spelling out “THIS IS JIM.”
For the next two hours, Marco and Jim Marino used the code to bring each other up to date.
HERE WITH JENNY DAVE RANDY
HERE WITH NOAH
HOW
RESCUE YOU
WHY
FAMILY
SORRY
NO PROBLEM ANY NEWS
WE HANG THREE DAYS
YES US TOO SOON
SORRY ANY HOPE
ALL PART OF PLAN
WHERE JENNY
TWO CELL OVER
SHE CODE
NO ONLY ME
ANY OTHER TALK
NO GET HURT IF TALK
After two hours, Marco knew that Dave, Jenny and Randy were the next three cells past Jim’s, but none of them knew Morse code. He knew that the few attempts they had made to shout to each other had resulted in beatings, so they had stopped. Jim had only taken the chance that whoever came in might know code on a whim, but they were both glad he had done so.
Marco suspected Noah would know Morse code, but there was no response when he tried. He figured Noah was probably getting some sleep, and finally decided that he should do so himself. He lay down on the bunk and closed his eyes, and was amazed at how quickly exhaustion set in.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Tell me who sent you.”
“I told you already. Nobody sent us, we don’t work for anybody, we don’t have anything to do with anything.”
The next sound out of the man’s mouth was a scream, as the electrical device sent paroxysms of pain through his body. The scream lasted for half a minute, and then he was simply gasping for breath.
“You are quite amazing, Mr. Stewart,” said Captain Fedorov. “Very few men can endure as much pain as I've given you without telling me what I want to hear. Most of them, in fact, will try to tell me anything they think I want to hear, even if it is not true. They will do anything to make the pain stop, but you've obviously been trained to endure it. I'm curious what kind of training it took to accomplish that. Were you subjected to these kinds of torture, to let you build up a tolerance for them?”
“No,” Randy said, still trying to catch his breath. “I just—I just had to—get used to listening to—people who are full of bullshit, like you.” He managed to chuckle at his own joke.
Fedorov burst out laughing. “Very amazing, truly amazing. Of course, none of this really matters. You have already been sentenced to die, so I'm merely offering you the chance to live without pain for your last hours. Tell me what I wish to know, and all of this will come to an end.”
“If I had anything to tell you,” Randy said, “maybe I would. You want to know who I work for? I work for that woman I'm married to. I know you checked our backgrounds, so you know I’m telling you the truth. She inherited a fortune from her daddy when he died, including that god-awful matchmaking website. When we're back home, all I do is sit in an office and pretend I give a shit when the customers call in to complain about their latest date.”
“Ah, yes, the lovely Mrs. Stewart. Perhaps it's time to tell you that she and I will be spending some time together this afternoon. You don’t need to worry, though, we've found that pain is less effective with women. They respond better to rape, in fact. They can usually hold out for the first two or three men, but by the time they’ve been raped for the fourth or fifth or sixth time, they tend to open up and start talking.” He chuckled. “I like to go first, myself.”
Randy grinned at him. “Go for it,” he said. “That little whore will probably enjoy it. It didn’t take me long to figure out that her idea of being married was just having a husband to blame every
thing on. Being faithful isn’t something she is too familiar with.”
“Really?” Fedorov asked. “Then perhaps you would like it if I make sure to hang you last, so you can watch her drop through the gallows.”
“Suit yourself,” Randy said. “If we're all gonna die, I don’t think it matters which one of us lives sixty seconds longer.”
“Tell me about Samuel Winston,” Fedorov said, suddenly changing the subject. “If you don’t work for anybody else, why would Mr. Winston have been arrested trying to steal the schedule of events for your executions?”
“I've not the slightest idea who you're talking about. Can you give me a hint?”
“Sure. He is six foot two, blonde hair, blue eyes, and in very good physical condition. Does that ring your bells?”
Holy crap, Randy thought, Noah’s been caught, too. “Can’t say it does.”
The questioning went on for a few more hours, with occasional electric shocks to stimulate Randy’s memory, but he managed to hold out. The occasional scream he heard muffled in the background told him that he wasn’t the only one being tortured, but he hadn’t heard anything that sounded like Jenny, yet. A part of him was glad of that, but he knew it was only a matter of time.
Finally, Fedorov motioned to one of the guards and Randy was taken off the chains from which he’d been hanging. His legs wouldn’t function, so he was carried back to his cell and dropped unceremoniously on the bunk. The door slammed shut, and a moment later he heard another one open.
The guards ordered someone to step out, and Randy heard a voice he would know anywhere.
“Sure, no problem,” Noah said. He walked out of the room and stood while he was handcuffed, then let the guards take him by the arms and walk him through the hallway.
Noah was taken into the same room Randy had just left, and three armed guards kept him covered while his cuffs were removed and he was suspended by his arms from the same chains that had held Randy only moments before. Captain Fedorov, who had questioned him when he had first arrived, stepped into the room and smiled at him.
